A Quantum Black Hole Colloquy

May 23 - 25, 2025
The University of Chicago - Michelson Center for Physics

Hosted by: Kadanoff Center for Theoretical Physics

Organized by: Emil Martinec and Samir Mathur

The goal of this meeting to foster an exchange of ideas on different approaches to and ideas surrounding this vexing problem, which has been with us for half a century now, yet continues to engender a great deal of confusion.

In order to facilitate such an exchange of perspectives, the standard
format of days full of talks will be replaced by a more informal series of discussion sessions.  There will be no talks, only discussion sessions (organized by topic).   The idea is to collect together people who have thought about the information puzzle, and give them an opportunity to share their views on what we have learned from all the past and recent attempts at solving the problem, and on where we should go next. We aim to focus on very fundamental issues, with the aim of clarifying the basic goals of different approaches.

The topics will include Islands, ER=EPR/Wormholes, Entanglement, Operator Algebras, QEC/Codes/Small Corrections, and Fuzzballs.  Each of these topics will have its own session.  We will start things off with a brief overview by a discussion leader and then have a free-flowing discussion among the participants.