HET Journal club: Rasmus Jaksland

Speaker: Rasmus Jaksland

Title: (Metaphysical) fundamentality in AdS/CFT

Abstract: What would be a truthful description of reality in a world where the AdS/CFT correspondence obtains? According to Horowitz and Polchinski (2009, 178): “AdS/CFT duality is an example of emergent gravity, emergent spacetime, and emergent general coordinate invariance. But it is also an example of emergent strings!” This seems to propose priority to the CFT side. This presentation explores what reasons we have (if any) to believe that reality is really as described by the CFT side and not the AdS side. The discussion will particularly draw on the relation between gravity and entanglement entropy due to Mark van Raamsdonk and collaborators. In the process, the presentation will introduce problems and reasoning characteristic of philosophy of physics.