Toggle light / dark theme

When the theoretical physicist Leonard Susskind encountered a head-scratching paradox about black holes, he turned to an unexpected place: computer science. In nature, most self-contained systems eventually reach thermodynamic equilibrium… but not black holes. The interior volume of a black hole appears to forever expand without limit. But why? Susskind had a suspicion that a concept called computational complexity, which underpins everything from cryptography to quantum computing to the blockchain and AI, might provide an explanation.

He and his colleagues believe that the complexity of quantum entanglement continues to evolve inside a black hole long past the point of what’s called “heat death.” Now Susskind and his collaborator, Adam Brown, have used this insight to propose a new law of physics: the second law of quantum complexity, a quantum analogue of the second law of thermodynamics.

Also appearing in the video: Xie Chen of CalTech, Adam Bouland of Stanford and Umesh Vazirani of UC Berkeley.

00:00 Intro to a second law of quantum complexity.

Claim your SPECIAL OFFER for MagellanTV here: https://try.magellantv.com/historyoftheuniverse. Start your free trial TODAY so you can watch Other Earths: The Search For Habitable Planets, and the rest of MagellanTV’s science collection: https://www.magellantv.com/video/other-earths-the-search-for-habitable-planets.

If you like this video, check out Geraint Lewis´ excellent book, co-written with Chris Ferrie:
Where Did the Universe Come From? And Other Cosmic Questions: Our Universe, from the Quantum to the Cosmos.

AND check out his Youtube channel:

Recent Gaia satellite findings suggest that dwarf galaxies are transient and less influenced by dark matter than previously believed, challenging long-held assumptions about their nature and composition.

Commonly thought to be long-lived satellites of our galaxy, a new study now finds indications that most dwarf galaxies might in fact be destroyed soon after their entry into the Galactic halo. Thanks to the latest catalog from ESA’s Gaia satellite, an international team has now demonstrated that dwarf galaxies might be out of equilibrium. The study opens important questions on the standard cosmological model, particularly on the prevalence of dark matter in our nearest environment.

It has long been assumed that the dwarf galaxies around the Milky Way are ancient satellites orbiting our Galaxy for nearly 10 billion years. This required them to contain huge amounts of dark matter to protect them from the enormous tidal effects due to the gravitational pull of our galaxy. It was assumed that dark matter caused the large differences observed in the velocities of the stars within these dwarf galaxies.

PBS Member Stations rely on viewers like you. To support your local station, go to: http://to.pbs.org/DonateSPACE

Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord!
/ pbsspacetime.

If we ever want to simulate a universe, we should probably learn to simulate even a single atomic nucleus. But it’s taken some of the most incredible ingenuity of the past half-century to figure out how that out. All so that today I can teach you how to simulate a very very small universe.

Check out the Space Time Merch Store.