DIPC Colloquium: Quantum black hole physics
DIPC Seminars
- Speaker
-
Gerardus 't Hooft, Institute for Theoretical Physics, Utrecht, The Netherlands
- When
-
2018/10/03
14:00 - Place
- Donostia International Physics Center
- Add to calendar
- iCal
Since Hawking's discovery that quantum field theoretical features force black
holes to emit articles at a calculable rate, some researchers realised that
some modifications in the laws of General Relativity in its relation to
Quantum Mechanics may be called for. This is of crucial importance for a
better understanding of Quantum Gravity. It is often claimed that
(super)string theory, adorned with AdS/CFT conjectures, should provide for all
the answers, but we claim that this is not so. These theories are not
sufficiently precise to notice violations of unitarity and causality, caused
by subtle quantum singularities such as "firewalls" along the event horizon,
if one is not sufficiently careful in choosing boundary conditions at this
horizon. But one can do the calculations without string theory or AdS/CFT, and
then some remarkable results arise, leading to predictions that might become
experimentally observable when horizons can be inspected with telescopes.