Public Lecture

Speaker: Juan Maldacena

The Meaning of Spacetime: Black Holes, wormholes and quantum entanglement

According to Einstein's theory of gravity, spacetime is curved and dynamical. The theory had two surprising predictions, black holes and the expansion of the universe. In both cases there are regions of spacetime that are outside the reach of the classical theory, the so called ``singularities''.  In order to treat them, we need a quantum mechanical description of spacetime. We will describe some ideas that arose from the study of quantum aspects of black holes. They involve an interesting connection between the basic quantum mechanical description and the geometry of spacetime. We will describe how wormholes are related to quantum entanglement.

Free Tickets available Monday, July 17, 2023 at 9:00 am