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

The concept of relative entropy is quite nice.

The gravity from entropy action is quite innovative also from the point of view of statistical mechanics.

So just to make things clear, right, the entropy is usually, you know, Boltzmann definition is the logarithm of the number of microstates compatible with the macrostate of a system.

And this is huge, right?

Because the entropy described the second law of thermodynamics, which is, of course, one of the building blocks of physics.

And because the entropy is defined in this way,

never decreases, so as the tendencies of increasing.

And people are usually quite impressed by this second law of thermodynamics and things like that.

But for my perspective, it's just a measure of quantify what you know about the system in terms of information theory.

So the relative entropy is a different concept, right?

It's when you want to compare two different states, for instance, two different quantum states, and express how much information in a quantum state is codified in the other quantum state.

So if one quantum state describes the real geometry and the other quantum state describes the geometry that kind of the matter and the curvature would like to see, right, this gravity from entropy action describes this tension between these two.

And actually...

Another property of this action is that it treats, in some sense, very symmetrically the geometry and the matter field, because they are just, you know, described in terms of two metrics and is comparing these two metrics with this geometric quantum relative entropy.

So you have this tendency of these two metrics to try to be close to each other, to approximate each other.

But actually, the gravity from entropy action doesn't have only the Lagrangian, but has also the measure.

And the measure actually plays also an important term, right?

So conceptually, the gravity from entropy action wants to describe this tension between these two metrics, wanted to be close to each other.

But at the same time, there is a nice mathematical aspect of it.

Because this entropy is defined like the trace of a logarithm and one of the mathematical properties that the trace of the logarithm is the logarithm of the determinant.

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