Morpheus

From Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

349 | Daniel Harlow on What Quantum Gravity Teaches Us About Quantum Mechanics

Published
March 30, 2026
Length
1:25:33

Audio is streamed from the publisher.

Show notes

There is something special about gravity. After decades of effort, there is still no convergence on the right way to reconcile Einstein's theory of general relativity with the framework of quantum mechanics. But a number of intriguing ideas have arisen along the way, including black hole radiation, the wave function of the universe, the AdS/CFT correspondence, and the role of quantum information theory. Theoretical physicist Daniel Harlow has made significant contributions to our understanding of information loss in black holes; in this conversation we turn those insights onto quantum cosmology, with potentially significant implications for how quantum mechanics itself works. ">https://schema.org/ImageObject"> Blog post with transcript: [">https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2026/03/30/349-daniel-harlow-on-what-quantum-gravity-teaches-us-about-quantum-mechanics/">]( ) _Support Mindscape on [https://www.patreon.com/seanmcarroll"]( Patreon._ Daniel Harlow received his Ph.D. in physics from Stanford University. He is currently an associate professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Among his awards are a Packard Fellowship and the [New">https://breakthroughprize.org/Laureates/1/L3835">New]( https://www.mit.edu/\~harlow/">Web]( https://physics.mit.edu/faculty/daniel-harlow/">MIT]( https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=lz4HDRwAAAAJ&hl=en">Google]( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel\_Harlow">Wikipedia