Daniel Harlow, Assistant Professor of Physics, MIT
Constructing a theory of quantum gravity is one of the grand challenges of theoretical physics. In recent years considerable progress has been made on this problem in the special (and unfortunately unphysical) context of a negative cosmological constant, using the powerful tools of the anti de Sitter/ conformal field theory (AdS/CFT) correspondence. In this talk I will explain how this correspondence can be naturally reformulated using the theory of quantum error correction, which was originally invented to protect quantum computers from decoherence. I will also explain how this reformulation clarifies several old puzzles in quantum gravity. The talk should be accessible to beginning graduate students.