Thankful to have been on this list! I graduated in May, so you should give my spot to a current grad student. (Any chance there's a postdoc list going...?)
30.09.2025 20:03
👍 0
🔁 0
💬 0
📌 0
Thankful to have been on this list! I graduated in May, so you should give my spot to a current grad student. (Any chance there's a postdoc list going...?)
My name plate (featuring XKCD comics) outside my office at CU
View of campus from the 11th floor of the Gamow tower
So long CU! Thanks for the wonderful adventures 🦬
This was recently recommended to me! I haven't gotten around to it yet, but it's on my list
Possibly! This would certainly allow us to add a baby universe to a holographic map for de Sitter by allowing for post-selection. It would be interesting to construct a model like Antonini-Sasieta-Swingle and Antonini-Rath for de Sitter + baby!
Oh no! What have we done!?
I think so! I included success kid in the post, but not the paper.
But maybe it's also computationally difficult to determine if the post contains a meme...
Figure from linked paper showing two bulk states: one with a baby universe, and one without. The baby universe contains the "success kid" meme.
Baby’s first single-author paper!
...or is it? Turns out testing for baby universes in your AdS bulk is trickier than expected.
Check it out:
arxiv.org/pdf/2507.05337
My 7th grade biology teacher once lit germ-x on fire to demonstrate that it was “alive” based on our textbook’s definition.
Needless to say, the demo really stuck with me!
On Overleaf: "Uncategorized (0)"
The summer after graduation is the perfect time to finally organize my Overleaf projects. Feels so good!
It’s been a great time so far! I’m especially looking forward to next week’s lectures.
A picture of the CU Boulder lecture hall with the first day of TASI lectures.
First day of #TASI2025 was a success!
I learned so much from the international students I studied alongside at Georgia Tech and CU Boulder. They made me a better physicist — and a better citizen of the world.
www.npr.org/2025/05/22/n...
In my PhD robes sitting on the University of Colorado at Boulder sign!
Discovered a new isometry last week!
V = U ( 𝟙 ⊗ |PhD〉)
a massage isn’t enough I need to be spaghettified by a black hole
Does that mean the walls are CFTs??
A picture of myself with the title slide of my defense presentation showing my thesis title "Honey, I Shrunk the Hilbert Space: From Dualities to Non-Isometric Codes in Holography"
Delayed post, but I passed my defense on Tuesday!! So thankful to all who helped make this dream a reality
Congrats! See you in Boulder this summer!
Thank you @booker.senate.gov. Truly inspiring!
Sad that I wasn't able to join, but so good to see Coloradans showing up. Thanks @aoc.bsky.social and @sanders.senate.gov for making a few stops in colorful CO!
Thesis submitted to committee ✅
Doctoral final examination form submitted ✅
Defense announcement form submitted ✅
T-18 days till defense!
Either approach (HUZ's or ours) can be used to include observers in generic holographic maps for both open and closed universes in any dimension. I'm excited about the possibilities both proposals open up for studying observers in holographic maps! (9/9)
Our approach: remove the part of the holographic map that acts on the observer. Thus the new non-trivial Hilbert space is given by the observer's Hilbert space AND the area of the boundary separating them from the rest of the universe. (8/9)
No such holographic code has been proposed to match AAIL's rules for including an observer. We do just that! This allows a more thorough comparison between the two different approaches. (7/9)
Their approach: clone the observer to a non-gravitational reference outside the closed universe. Thus the new non-trivial Hilbert space is given by the observer's Hilbert space. (6/9)
HUZ also describes how their method can be used to include an observer in a non-isometric holographic map describing the closed universe. They show that this reproduces their results from the gravitational path integral. (5/9)
Refs:
HUZ: arxiv.org/pdf/2501.02359
AAIL: arxiv.org/pdf/2501.02632
(4/9)
Recent work by Harlow-Usatyuk-Zhao (HUZ) and Abdalla-Antonini-Iliesiu-Levine (AAIL) have tried two methods for including observers in gravitational path integrals. Both successfully find a non-trivial Hilbert space thanks to the presence of the observer, but they get different answers! (3/9)
Some context: gravitational path integrals indicate that the Hilbert space of a closed universe is trivial. How can this be? For all we know, our own universe might be closed, and our lives are far from trivial. (2/9)
And it's live! arxiv.org/pdf/2503.09681
What's our role as observers in the universe? We discuss how observers might be included in holographic codes. A 🧵... (1/9)
The title page of a manuscript with title "On observers in holographic maps" by authors Chris Akers, Gracemarie Bueller, Oliver DeWolfe, Kenneth Higginbotham, Johannes Reinking, and Rudolph Rodriguez.
Coming tomorrow to an arXiv listing near you!