Currently at the KITP

Right now I’m in the midst of a program I helped to organize (and I’m still organizing) at the KITP. The program deals with the question of how to use numerical methods from lattice and gravity to make inroads into interesting (usually very hard) questions about quantum field theory (and quantum gravity) and the dynamics [...]

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Novel Numerical Methods for Strongly Coupled Quantum Field Theory and Quantum Gravity

Here is an announcement of a program I will be organizing at the KITP from Jan 17 thru March 9 2012. It is a program on numerical methods for gravity and QFT. The web page of the program is located here. Here is the image I made to illustrate the program: it is generated by [...]

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Gravity does not exist?

I happened onto an article on the New York Times abut Erik Verlinde’s take on gravity as an Entropic force. The article was written by Dennis Overbye who most of the time does  a good job of covering high energy physics.  Erik’s work dates from earlier this year and can be found here. To tell [...]

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Cosmic censorship in five dimensions

New evidence against cosmic censorship in five dimensions was announced today in the arxiv. The evidence is numerical, but it is done by a very good group of people working on numerical general relativity: Luis Lehner and Frans Pretorius. They argue that in the black string Gregory Laflamme instability the system develops `singularities in finite [...]

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Must read papers of the week

The Gravity Research Foundation announced the results of the 2010 competition. Here are the results. At UCSB we discussed the prize-winning paper by Mark van Raamsdonk today. It was a very lively discussion and we thought it was a great paper to read. Mark’s paper provided some very tantalyzing evidence that entanglement seems to play [...]

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The size of a donut hole

At some point I promised that I was going to write about my  most recent paper. So here is my promotion. In a sense, that paper is an exercise to understand what does it mean to have quantum gravity in a setup of emergent geometry: this is a situation where geometry is not there a [...]

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PASI quantum gravity summer school

There will be a school on quantum gravity this summer in Morelia, Mexico, from June 23rd to July the 3rd. Don Marolf, the chair of the event asked me to promote the event. The deadline for applications is January 31st (the end of this week). There is also going to be a workshop on future [...]

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Yet another workshop announcement….

I’m organizing a workshop in late September, together with Jun Nishimura and Toby Wiseman, taking place in London. We’re very close to the limit of participants that we can afford. The workshop will be on Numerical approaches to AdS/CFT, large N and (quantum) gravity. We’re going to put a lot of people who have not [...]

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Belief and facts in theoretical physics

Today on the arxiv Oswaldo Zapata wrote an essay on issues about fact and belief systems in superstring theory. Naturally, Peter Woit decided that this was really important and wrote a whole article about it. Here I will collect a few recollections that serve as a rebuttal/complement to some of those discussions. Mostly, I feel [...]

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Black holes as frozen stars

We now have a few working examples of a microscopic theory of quantum gravity, all come with specific boundary conditions (like any other equation in physics or mathematics), but otherwise full background independence. In particular, all those theories include quantum black holes, and we can ask all kinds of puzzling questions about those fascinating objects. [...]

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