Black Holes and a Return to 2D Gravity! – Part I
(A somewhat more technical post follows.) Well, I think I promised to say a bit more about what I’ve been up to in that work that resulted in the paper I talked about in an earlier post. The title of...
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Black Holes and a Return to 2D Gravity! – Part II
(A somewhat more technical post follows.) Continuing from part I: Well, I set the scene there, and so after that, a number of different ideas come together nicely. Let me list them: [caption...
View ArticleNew and Improved!
Updated with lots of new results! For your reading pleasure as 1912.03637 on the arXiv. (And still a swift read at 14 pages.) New results include a fascinating differential equation for spectral...
View ArticleTalk Prep
How do I prepare my research talks? I usually just sit down with a pencil, some paper and a cup of something warm, and I just draw/map out the story. Each box is a beat of the narrative, and ends up...
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Spectral, I
Ok here goes. Been bursting to tell you this for many weeks. Ever wondered what the fully non-perturbative spectral form factor for a JT gravity model looks like? For real? Not in some special limit or...
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Spectral, II
What’s that now? You want more physics teases? Ok. That dotted line is a (known) JT gravity Schwarzian spectral density. That red line? It’s the fully quantum corrected result! To all orders in...
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This Feels Great!
[caption id="attachment_19729" align="aligncenter" width="499"] Andrea Ghez accepting the 2020 Nobel Prize for Physics[/caption]You know, it is easy (and healthy) to be steadfastly cynical about the...
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Full Circle
Yesterday I submitted (with collaborators Felipe Rosso and Andrew Svesko) a new paper to the arXiv that I'm very excited about! It came from one of those lovely moments when a warm flash of...
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Matrices and Gravity
So I have a confession to make. I started working on random matrix models (the large $latex N$, double-scaled variety) in 1990 or 1991, so about 30 years ago, give or take. I've written many papers on...
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Completing a Story
[A rather technical post follows.] [caption id="attachment_19916" align="aligncenter" width="499"] This figure will make more sense later in the post. It is here for decoration. Sit tight.[/caption]...
View ArticleEmbracing Both Wigner and ‘t Hooft
That Feeling Several weeks ago, while writing up a nice set of results that extended some work I did last year, I found that I was stuck finding the right wording for how I should nuance a (seemingly...
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A New Distribution
The red curve in this figure is the probability distribution of the ground state energy [latex]E=s[/latex] of the microstate spectra of quantum completions of JT gravity. Put differently (the way...
View ArticleRattle and Hum
A lot of us have been waiting for a long time to hear this news! The NANOGrav collaboration has announced strong evidence of a background of low frequency gravitational waves emitted from supermassive...
View ArticleLiving in the Matrix – Recent Advances in Understanding Quantum Spacetime
It has been extremely busy in the ten months or so since I last wrote something here. It’s perhaps the longest break I’ve taken from blogging for 20 years (gosh!) but I think it was a healthy thing to...
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Decoding the Universe!
I realised just now that I entirely forgot (it seems) to post about an episode of PBS' show Nova called "Decoding the Universe: Cosmos" which aired back in the Spring. I thought they did a good job of...
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