Abstract: Black holes provide a window into quantum gravity through their thermodynamic properties. Recently, it has been discovered that higher topology solutions provide additional information about the UV and play an essential role in its consistency. I will discuss how these solutions are used to study statistical properties of the quantum theory, and describe the example of thin-shell wormholes, which are used to understand the coarse-grained entropy of black holes formed by gravitational collapse. The results point toward the conclusion that quantum gravity satisfies a strong form of the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis.
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Lunch will be provided at 12:00pm, so please come early to eat mingle and eat lunch before the talk begins.