Raphael Bousso () (born 1971) is a

theoretical physicist Theoretical physics is a branch of physics that employs mathematical models and abstractions of physical objects and systems to rationalize, explain and predict natural phenomena. This is in contrast to experimental physics, which uses experime ...

and

cosmologist Cosmology () is a branch of physics and metaphysics dealing with the nature of the universe. The term ''cosmology'' was first used in English in 1656 in Thomas Blount's ''Glossographia'', and in 1731 taken up in Latin by German philosopher ...

. He is a professor at the Berkeley Center for Theoretical Physics in the Department of Physics,

UC Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant uni ...

. He is known for the Bousso bound on the information content of the universe. With

Joseph Polchinski Joseph Gerard Polchinski Jr. (; May 16, 1954 – February 2, 2018) was an American theoretical physicist and string theorist. Biography Polchinski was born in White Plains, New York, the elder of two children to Joseph Gerard Polchinski Sr. (1929 ...

, Bousso proposed the

string theory landscape The string theory landscape or landscape of vacua refers to the collection of possible false vacua in string theory,The number of metastable vacua is not known exactly, but commonly quoted estimates are of the order 10500. See M. Douglas, "The ...

as a solution to the

cosmological constant problem In cosmology, the cosmological constant problem or vacuum catastrophe is the disagreement between the observed values of vacuum energy density (the small value of the cosmological constant) and theoretical large value of zero-point energy sugges ...

Life and career

Bousso was born in

Haifa Haifa ( he, חֵיפָה ' ; ar, حَيْفَا ') is the third-largest city in Israel—after Jerusalem and Tel Aviv—with a population of in . The city of Haifa forms part of the Haifa metropolitan area, the third-most populous metropol ...

, Israel, the son of late scientis
Dino Bousso
He grew up near

Augsburg Augsburg (; bar , Augschburg , links=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swabian_German , label=Swabian German, , ) is a city in Swabia, Bavaria, Germany, around west of Bavarian capital Munich. It is a university town and regional seat of the ...

, Germany, where he studied physics from 1990 until 1993. Bousso earned his PhD, Ph.D. at Cambridge University in 1997; his doctoral advisor was Stephen Hawking. Bousso did postdoctoral research at Stanford University until 2000, and at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara until 2002. In 2002/03, Bousso was a fellow at the Harvard University physics department and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Since 2002, he has been a professor in the physics department at the UC Berkeley, University of California, Berkeley. In 2012, Bousso was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society "for fundamental discoveries in the field of quantum cosmology, including the covariant entropy bound and the string landscape."

Research

Bousso's research is focused on quantum gravity and cosmology, particularly through the study of quantum information. His 1999 covariant entropy bound ( Bousso bound) established a general relation between quantum information and the geometry of spacetime (i.e., General relativity, gravity). The Bousso bound has since been refined and strengthened, leading to provable new results in quantum field theory, such as the quantum null energy condition. Bousso has also worked on the black hole information paradox (firewall problem). Since 2018, he has led a consortium of theoretical and experimental physicists exploring and developing the relations between quantum gravity, quantum information, and quantum computing. In 2000, Bousso and

argued that string theory has many long-lived Vacuum solution, vacua, including solutions compatible with the observed positive value of the cosmological constant (vacuum energy). This came to be called the "landscape of string theory." Bousso has developed an approach to the cosmological measure problem, with the ultimate goal of testing the string theory landscape.

Life and career

Research

References

External links