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Leonard Susskind on The World As Hologram | TVO Docs

TVO DocsRecommended by 7 HN commenters across 5 months, 2013–2021
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lecture · intro · evergreen · 2013–2021 on HN

Stanford physicist Leonard Susskind gives a public lecture on the holographic principle, the indestructibility of information and the nature of black holes. It asks whether the world could be a hologram.

HN commenters recommend it as an accessible yet substantive introduction to the holographic principle and black hole information, often when related physics news comes up.

11 comments from Hacker News

@aeternum2019-08 · in “How do black holes destroy information and why is that a problem?”

There is a somewhat recent theory that supports this idea. It is unclear whether or not things actually fall-in, but the idea is that the entire surface is a hologram, and the surface alone is sufficient to describe the entire contents. (Thus preventing any information loss). Much better described here: ▶ this video

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@jahnu2019-01 · in “How Space and Time Could Be a Quantum Error-Correcting Code”

Not sure if it's related but this lecture gave me some basic grasp on the notion of holographic representations ▶ this video

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@zwkrt2019-01 · in “Strangeness of Black Holes”

Suskind actually has a whole lecture on Youtube devoted to addressing the paradox of falling into a black hole from the perspective of the person falling in versus an outside observer. The outside observer sees the falling observer catastrophically turned into high-entropy soup smeared across the horizon, while the one falling feels nothing particularly special as they cross the event horizon. ▶ this video

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@keldaris2018-01 · in “Things you must know before you can understand Meltdown as a developer”

Since you asked for more depth, I'll focus on the (comparatively easier) task of giving some links to technical literature. First of all, if you already have a traditional QFT background, there's the two extremes of either just taking a simple toy example to play with [1] or a fairly rigorous well written lecture course [2]. For a more general physics/math background I'd recommend a slightly more pedagogical treatment [3], but it's still accurate to the subject matter and therefore contains graduate level mathematics. There's a lot more out there, but these are just some of the descriptions I've personally skimmed and found them to be well written and useful. On the other end of the scale, there's a huge amount of popular documentaries out there that purport to say something about AdS/CFT. Most of them either contain nonsense or don't say very much at all. I don't really know how useful the popular analogies really are, but in the spirit of making at least one recommendation that doesn't contain any math, Susskind's public lectures are easy to watch (here's one [4]), and Susskind is careful not to talk nonsense. There isn't really much on AdS/CFT that's in between graduate level mathematics and math-less popular stuff. The reason is that it's a fairly irreducible concept in the sense that you really need to understand what an anti-de Sitter space is and how conformal field theories work to see why there's a mathematical correspondence between them, and this isn't truly analog

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@platz2017-01 · in “Study reveals substantial evidence of holographic universe”

Black hole Firewalls with Sean Carroll and Jennifer Ouellette (45m+50s quick summary of the holographic principle) link Leonard Susskind on The World As Hologram (more dense/verbose) ▶ this video

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