Research

# Complexity and Classicality

Earlier this summer I had the good fortune to be able to attend an (online) workshop on information and complexity. One of the most fascinating talks was by Scott Aaronson on the question of the emergence of the classical world from an underlying quantum substrate and the relation to complexity and computation. Background This –… Continue reading Complexity and Classicality

Research

# “Loop Quantum Gravity is Dead … ”

… is a phrase that many high energy theorists, especially those of the stringy persuasion, long to hear. Fortunately, to borrow a phrase from Mark Twain, reports of the death of loop quantum gravity (LQG) are greatly exaggerated. Premature declarations of the imminent demise of LQG have a long history. The most recent one comes… Continue reading “Loop Quantum Gravity is Dead … ”

Research

# This Year-ish in Theoretical Physics

The previous episode of “this week-ish” was posted on June 5. Its been six months since then. I guess its time to post another volume but to be fair the title of this post has been changed to reflect the longer time span its contents refer to. Gravity as Quantum Computation (contd from Vol. 1)… Continue reading This Year-ish in Theoretical Physics

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# Specific Heats of AdS Black Holes and Quantum Geometry

Schottky Peaks and AdS Black Holes In , Clifford Johnson makes yet another contribution to the study of black holes in anti-deSitter spacetimes or AdS black holes, for short. In this work he studies those black holes for which the specific heat at constant volume $C_V$ (with “volume” here referring to the volume… Continue reading Specific Heats of AdS Black Holes and Quantum Geometry

# This Week-ish in Theoretical Physics

Surely it is hubris on my part to presume to co-opt the title of the venerable online column “This Week’s Finds in Mathematical Physics” written for nearly seventeen years by the great doyen of mathematical communication – John Baez. However, not finding any other takers for this task I figured … why not? So here… Continue reading This Week-ish in Theoretical Physics

# Implementing Quaternions in Julia

Julia is making waves in the scientific programming community as the language to learn if you truly want to be a computational code ninja. I won’t list out all the features which make Julia such an incredilicious language to learn. You can’t go clicks on the internet without stumbling into a paean to Julia, so… Continue reading Implementing Quaternions in Julia

Research

# On the Compactness of Anti-deSitter Space

In my last post, on the IAGRG30 Conference held at BITS Hyderabad, I had mentioned how during my talk I was corrected by Amitabh Virmani on a seemingly technical point. My talk was on connecting String Theory with Loop Quantum Gravity and as is inevitable in any such talk I opened with a brief description… Continue reading On the Compactness of Anti-deSitter Space

# IAGRG30 – Kepler, Maldacena, Ashtekar and all that …

IAGRG30 – India’s Biennial Gravity Meetup I was recently in BITS Hyderabad 1 attending the 30th meeting of the Indian Association for General Relativity and Gravitation (IAGRG30). I was pleasantly surprised that my abstract was selected for a talk and that too for the very first talk on the first day of the “Quantum Gravity”… Continue reading IAGRG30 – Kepler, Maldacena, Ashtekar and all that …

Research

# Comment on “A Post-Quantum Theory of Classical Gravity”

Sometime ago Jonathan Oppenheim, one of the brightest minds in the frontiers  of quantum information and quantum foundations, posted a very interesting article on arXiv. As is the custom these days, he announced the paper in a series of tweets, starting with: A post-quantum theory of classical gravity? https://t.co/uNbsbZ2AYq A consistent theory of classical gravity… Continue reading Comment on “A Post-Quantum Theory of Classical Gravity”

Research

# Cosmological Curvature and the Planck Scale

While reading up on anti-deSitter spaces in , I encountered the following quote attributed to Gauss by the author: “I have sometimes in jest expressed the wish that Euclidean geometry is not true. For then we would have an absolute a priori unit of measurement.” This is not just an empty wish. If quantum gravity… Continue reading Cosmological Curvature and the Planck Scale