Science
Maldacena Reveals Conceptual Crisis Around Wormholes in String Theory
Theories of Everything
Juan Maldacena: Geometry as Entanglement, and the Emergence of Spacetime
What was said
"I'm trying to understand wormholes. Wormholes are a bit like leaky pipes in the sense that not everything is fitting together. There are many ideas that surround wormholes and they're not all compatible with each other. The question is, we probably need to modify some ideas or we need to, maybe they have some subtleties that we haven't understood."
Maldacena disclosed he is actively working to resolve fundamental incompatibilities in how wormholes are treated across different theoretical frameworks. Wormholes are essential for deriving the island formula and black hole entropy calculations, yet they also suggest constants of nature should be averaged over, conflicting with string theory models where constants are fixed. This represents one of the hottest unsolved problems in quantum gravity.
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- Programme
- Theories of Everything
- Episode
- Juan Maldacena: Geometry as Entanglement, and the Emergence of Spacetime
- Clip time
- 38:55
- Original source
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Theories of Everything