349 | Daniel Harlow on What Quantum Gravity Teaches Us About Quantum Mechanics
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
Sean Carroll
4.7 • 4.7K Ratings
🗓️ 30 March 2026
⏱️ 86 minutes
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Summary
There is something special about gravity. After decades of effort, there is still no convergence on the right way to reconcile Einstein's theory of general relativity with the framework of quantum mechanics. But a number of intriguing ideas have arisen along the way, including black hole radiation, the wave function of the universe, the AdS/CFT correspondence, and the role of quantum information theory. Theoretical physicist Daniel Harlow has made significant contributions to our understanding of information loss in black holes; in this conversation we turn those insights onto quantum cosmology, with potentially significant implications for how quantum mechanics itself works.
Daniel Harlow received his Ph.D. in physics from Stanford University. He is currently an associate professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Among his awards are a Packard Fellowship and the New Horizons in Physics Prize.
Transcript
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| 0:30.2 | Hello everyone. Welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. Many of us have |
| 0:34.6 | heard the story of Albert Einstein, who in 1905 had his miraculous year, where he wrote these wonderful papers about special relativity, quantum mechanics, brownian motion and atoms, things like that. |
| 0:48.4 | But then it was 10 years later in 1915 that he put forward the general theory of relativity, the theory of |
| 0:55.8 | space-time being curved, and that's what gravity is, et cetera. So the idea being that the smartest |
| 1:01.6 | physicist of the 20th century had about 10 years of really hard work, and he came up with this |
| 1:07.4 | earth-shattering theory that changed our views of space and time and the universe. |
| 1:12.4 | And it wasn't even continuous work. |
| 1:14.1 | Einstein wrote a lot of papers on other topics during those 10 years. |
| 1:18.5 | But that precedent kind of gives us an expectation, right? |
| 1:22.0 | Like if that smart a person can take that long time, 10 years, pretty long time, |
| 1:26.8 | then we shouldn't take too much |
| 1:29.2 | longer to make huge progress ourselves in the most difficult questions we have. After all, |
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