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Title:
Toward Emergent Time and Causality
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Abstract:
Time and space are treated on different footings in quantum theory, in stark contrast to special or general relativity. There has been recent progress towards understanding the emergence of spatial geometry from the entanglement of a quantum state (particularly in AdS-CFT), but a similar understanding of spacetime dynamics has remained elusive. To address these issues, we develop a general framework for quantum theory which puts space and time on the same footing. A crucial ingredient is a spacetime analog of quantum states. Our techniques enable a broad generalization of quantum information theory to spacetime which we use to study the emergence of time and causality. We find that causality in quantum systems is intimately tied to quantum error correction, which allows causality to behave classically on large distance scales but have exotic properties on small distance scales. Furthermore, we study how time “flows” from patches of spacetime states with small von Neumann entropy to patches with large von Neumann entropy. The talk will be accessible without knowledge of quantum information theory.
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