SITP Seminar: Entropy in a Coherent Universe: Quantum Information Flows in the Cosmic SuperWeb

Speaker: Dick Bond (CITA, University of Toronto) In Person

von Neumann of (thermal) quantum entropy fame purportedly responded to Shannon asking what his novel classical information content measure should be called: paraphrasing, entropy, nobody understands it anyway. Nowadays thermal entropy, gravitational entropy and information entropy have merged as ideas, and expanded to encompass phase info as well as counting info, into quantum information aka quantum cosmology. Entropic development and transport through all of the great cosmic epochs of instability accompanying transitions of phase is a unifying story of the Universe. Tis a big topic which I will meander through, from the emergence of coherence, through inflation. its end in the matter-entropy burst, cosmic neutrino background decoupling, cosmic photon decoupling, and entropy development and transport in the gravitationally-unstable nonlinear cosmic web, leading to black holes. With applications to observable entropic relics, such as  CnuB, CMB, CIB, the ubiquitous gravothermal core-halo, and etc.  One quest is for information-laden Planck-epoch intermittent non-Gaussianities, pinGs, which could generate anomalous collapse on any and all scales, e.g., with possible implications for enhanced rare event and even early black hole production, aka pingpong theory.Cosmic science is done by cosmic friends: This quite personal Bondian history will entropically en-tango many fellow-travellers through my ages; at Caltech, Berkeley, Stanford, Cambridge, KITP, CITA, and beyond. Fun for me as reminiscer, if not for you as reminisced upon.