Quantum error correction has given us a natural language for the emergence of spacetime, but the black hole interior poses a challenge for this framework: at late times the apparent number of interior degrees of freedom in effective field theory can vastly exceed the true number of fundamental degrees of freedom, so there can be no isometric (i.e. inner-product preserving) encoding of the former into the latter. I will explain how quantum error correction nonetheless can be used to explain the emergence of the black hole interior, via the idea of “non-isometric codes protected by computational complexity”.

Contact: Wu Jieqiang