We present a construction in which the origin of black hole entropy gets clarified. We start by building an infinite family of geometric microstates for black holes in general relativity. This construction naively overcounts the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy. We then describe how wormholes in the Euclidean path integral for gravity cause these states to have exponentially small, but universal,...
In this talk I will describe a picture which has emerged over the past few years regarding the statistical interpretation of semiclassical gravity and how this relates to wormholes, averaging and the so-called factorization puzzle.
I will review the “bootstrap” approach to compute primordial correlation functions in cosmology (which control the initial conditions for structure formation in the universe). This bootstrap relies on the existence of differential equations in terms of boundary momenta. I will describe a new method to efficiently characterize and (in some sense) explain the existence of these differential...
Quantum backreaction in semi-classical gravity is a notoriously difficult task. In this talk, I will explain how braneworld holography can help us tackle this problem. I will review some basic properties of braneworld models with or without a cosmological constant, emphasizing various semi-classical properties of the solutions. As an application, I will consider the backreaction due to...
