349 | Daniel Harlow on What Quantum Gravity Teaches Us About Quantum Mechanics
3/30/20261 hr 26 min
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.
Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2026/03/30/349-daniel-harlow-on-what-quantum-gravity-teaches-us-about-quantum-mechanics/
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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.
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First 90 secondsSpeaker 00:00
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Speaker 10:21
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Sean Carroll· Host1:04
Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. Many of us have heard the story of Albert Einstein, uh, who in 1905 had his miraculous year where he wrote these wonderful papers about special relativity, quantum mechanics, Brownian motion in atoms, things like that. But then it was ten years later in 1915 that he put forward the general theory of relativity, the theory