Ginestra Bianconi

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345 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 13 Jul

Ginestra Bianconi’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal · Ginestra Bianconi: The Physicist Who (Unexpectedly) Derived Gravity From Entropy · 13 Jul 2026 podcast

And of course, you know, there is this second law of thermodynamics, which is quite fundamental, but at the level of Clausius' result, we don't have any understanding of where it comes from.

And this was the genius of Boltzmann, which described the H theorem.

And the H theorem showed that H, which is his definition of entropy, really is an increasing function.

And so this is shown in a particular setting of what is called the ideal gas.

So practically you have a particle bouncing around with given velocity and they have an interaction that is hardcore interaction.

So when they bounce to each other, they scatter around.

But then there is no interaction at all.

And this ideal gas is our most profound understanding of the second principle of thermodynamics.

And this entropy is the number of microscopic configuration compatible with the macroscopic configuration of this gas.

Right?

That's the beauty and the universality of statistical mechanics.

So practically, you want to describe macroscopic law from a microscopic understanding of the degree of freedom.

You don't need to know all the details of your system.

You need to capture the important information theory content of the microscopic degree of freedom.

And this has been fundamental and pervasive in all physics, I would say, and also behind.

So practically, our understanding of phase transition or phase of matter comes from statistical mechanics, our understanding of classical and quantum phase transition, our understanding of also the building block of physics,

quantum information and quantum computation comes from this rich interplaying between statistical mechanics and information theory and without mentioning AI, of course.

And so this idea is that the idea is that information theory is such a pervasive concept that is already a common language across many different disciplines.

And with gravity from entropy, this idea, this information idea, are reflected in an alternative action for gravity, which is the gravity from entropy action.

And it's interesting and I think it's quite stimulating because, you know, in statistical mechanics, there are possibly two point of view, right?

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