Ginestra Bianconi: The Physicist Who (Unexpectedly) Derived Gravity From Entropy
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How does Ginestra Bianconi define gravity as an information-based theory?
Gravity from entropy is a new theory that quantifies the information content of the universe. It somehow challenges the reductionist approach.
This is Ginestra Bianconi, professor of applied mathematics at Queen Mary University of London, an architect of modern network science. Over the past few years, she went into the continuum despite coming from the discrete sector and published the radical paper, Gravity from Entropy. On this channel, I, Kurt Jaimungal, interview researchers regarding their theories of reality with rigor and technical depth. Today, Bianconi's case that gravity can be derived from entropy. How dark energy emerges from her equations on its own, always positive, not anti-de Sitter. And we close with the advice she gives her PhD students.
What keeps me awake at night is the second quantization of this theory. Maybe there is no single static solution of the black hole in gravity from entropy, and maybe this singularity is avoided.
What is gravity?
Well, I think we know that gravity is a fundamental force, and we know this since Newton. But it's a particular fundamental force because it somehow, from my perspective, challenges the reductionist approach. Because it is about geometry. And this is what we learn from Einstein. And geometry is what allows all the other fundamental forces to occur in nature. So somehow I think that gravity is about geometry and how geometry interacts with matter fields. And this is a general question. I mean, from my perspective, this question goes also behind gravity itself because it is a problem of the interplane between, generally speaking, structure and dynamics that is at the fundamental mathematical level common to many different other fields.
How did a network topologist like yourself get interested in gravity?
Yeah, so this is a nice question. In my career, I started doing research in this descript structure that are networks from nodes and links. And then I moved from networks to simplicial complex, which... allows to capture a discrete geometry and topology of a lot of systems and also real data that can be described with this system. I cannot maybe overstate that maybe in most of my research since now, I have always focused on the interplane between structure and dynamics. And this is very central, for instance, in network theory as well. But, you know, there are important results in network science. So, for instance, how, you know, the presence, the topology of the network, so the presence of big hub can affect epidemic spreading or things like that.
But recently it is becoming clear that topology and geometry also play a fundamental role in shaping the interplane between structure and dynamics. And I've been working a lot on how topology shapes dynamics in network, and this is an important mathematical problem that, you know, has implications for machine learning up to brain research. But, you know, if you want to build this theory, that is a theory that includes topology, geometry, and dynamics, there are two aspects. One aspect is that you want to write a theory that captures this interplane using information theory because ultimately you want to study, to describe the system in terms of their information content. And maybe we can go back to that.
But on the other side, you don't have enough mathematics in the discrete. So also the notion of curvature is not well-defined in the discrete setting. It's a very important proposal. I was giving a seminar at ICTP in Trieste in Italy, and somebody told me, but if you are doing this, why don't you do that in the continuum? Right. And I answered, no, I will never go in the continuum. And then I reflected on this and, you know, yes. So the continuum of this theory has to do a lot with gravity. And then why don't facing the real challenging problem that is gravity? quantum gravity and gravity. Because, you know, somehow I think maybe a bit controversial to understand the brain is more difficult to understand quantum gravity.
I'd like to bring people up to your results to have them understand it.
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Chapters
3 chapters
1
How does Ginestra Bianconi define gravity as an information-based theory?
0:00–16:16
2
Why did a network topologist switch from discrete models to a continuum approach in gravity research?
16:16–52:17
3
What is geometric quantum relative entropy and how does it form the action of Gravity from Entropy?
52:17–57:59
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal
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