Aron C. Wall is an American theoretical physicist, specializing in

quantum gravity Quantum gravity (QG) is a field of theoretical physics that seeks to describe gravity according to the principles of quantum mechanics; it deals with environments in which neither gravitational nor quantum effects can be ignored, such as in the v ...

. He is Lecturer of Physics at the

University of Cambridge , mottoeng = Literal: From here, light and sacred draughts. Non literal: From this place, we gain enlightenment and precious knowledge. , established = , other_name = The Chancellor, Masters and Schola ...

, and is one of the winners of the 2019

New Horizons in Physics Prize The Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics is one of the Breakthrough Prizes, awarded by the Breakthrough Prize Board. Initially named Fundamental Physics Prize, it was founded in July 2012 by Russia-born Israeli entrepreneur, venture capita ...

Biography and education

He was born on June 7, 1984, the son of programmer

Larry Wall Larry Arnold Wall (born September 27, 1954) is an American computer programmer and author. He created the Perl programming language. Personal life Wall grew up in Los Angeles and then Bremerton, Washington, before starting higher education at ...

. He received a B.A. in liberal arts in 2005 from St. John's College (Annapolis/Santa Fe) and a Ph.D. in physics in 2011 from the

Maryland Center for Fundamental Physics The Maryland Center for Fundamental Physics (MCFP) is a research institute at the University of Maryland, College Park focused on theoretical physics. About The MCFP was founded in 2007 and is currently directed by Raman Sundrum. It is a subd ...

of the

University of Maryland, College Park The University of Maryland, College Park (University of Maryland, UMD, or simply Maryland) is a public land-grant research university in College Park, Maryland. Founded in 1856, UMD is the flagship institution of the University System of ...

, under advisor

Ted Jacobson Theodore A. "Ted" Jacobson (born November 27, 1954) is an American theoretical physicist. He is known for his work on the connection between gravity and thermodynamics. In particular, in 1995 Jacobson proved that the Einstein field equations desc ...

. From 2011 to 2014 he was a Simons postdoctoral fellow at the

University of California, Santa Barbara The University of California, Santa Barbara (UC Santa Barbara or UCSB) is a public land-grant research university in Santa Barbara, California with 23,196 undergraduates and 2,983 graduate students enrolled in 2021–2022. It is part of the ...

, from 2014 to 2017 a fellow at the

Institute for Advanced Study The Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), located in Princeton, New Jersey, in the United States, is an independent center for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. It has served as the academic home of internationally preeminent scholar ...

in Princeton, from 2017 to 2019 a fellow at the

Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics The Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics (SITP) is a research institute within the Physics Department at Stanford University. Led by 16 physics faculty members, the institute conducts research in High Energy and Condensed Matter theoretica ...

and since then a lecturer in physics at the Cambridge University Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics.

Research

In 2016, together with Ping Gao and , he proposed a mechanism for traversable wormholes without

exotic matter There are several proposed types of exotic matter: * Hypothetical particles and states of matter that have "exotic" physical properties that would violate known laws of physics, such as a particle having a negative mass. * Hypothetical particle ...

. It is based on the interpretation of wormholes as pairs of

quantum entangled Quantum entanglement is the phenomenon that occurs when a group of particles are generated, interact, or share spatial proximity in a way such that the quantum state of each particle of the group cannot be described independently of the state of ...

particles (EPR) by

Leonard Susskind Leonard Susskind (; born June 16, 1940)his 60th birthday was celebrated with a special symposium at Stanford University.in Geoffrey West's introduction, he gives Suskind's current age as 74 and says his birthday was recent. is an American physicis ...

and

Juan Martín Maldacena Juan Martín Maldacena (born September 10, 1968) is an Argentine theoretical physicist and the Carl P. Feinberg Professor in the School of Natural Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He has made significant contributions to t ...

, known as the ER-EPR conjecture; however, Wall and colleagues did not use the usual

Einstein-Rosen Bridges A wormhole (Einstein-Rosen bridge) is a hypothetical structure connecting disparate points in spacetime, and is based on a special solution of the Einstein field equations. A wormhole can be visualized as a tunnel with two ends at separate po ...

, but that their wormhole model provides a mathematically equivalent description to quantum teleportation.

Controversies

Following Wall's appointment to a lectureship in the Faculty of Mathematics, attention was drawn to his anti-LGBT views, expressed on his blog. Comments included accusing the “gay community” of living a “notoriously promiscuous, reckless, and obscene lifestyle”, saying that to sleep with someone of the same gender is to perform “unnatural sex acts”.

Most cited peer-reviewed publications

*Wall AC. Maximin surfaces, and the strong subadditivity of the covariant holographic entanglement entropy. Classical and Quantum Gravity. 2014 Nov 4;31(22):225007. Cited 403 times according to

Google Scholar Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in beta in November 2004, the Google Scholar index includes p ...

Google Scholar user pag

Accessed Oct. 30, 2021 *Engelhardt N, Wall AC. Quantum extremal surfaces: holographic entanglement entropy beyond the classical regime. Journal of High Energy Physics. 2015 Jan;2015(1):1-27. Cited 355 times *Dong X, Harlow D, Wall AC. Reconstruction of bulk operators within the entanglement wedge in gauge-gravity duality. Physical review letters. 2016 Jul 8;117(2):021601. Cited 319 times *Gao P, Jafferis DL, Wall AC. Traversable wormholes via a double trace deformation. Journal of High Energy Physics. 2017 Dec;2017(12):1-25. Cited 318 times *Bousso R, Fisher Z, Leichenauer S, Wall AC. Quantum focusing conjecture. Physical Review D. 2016 Mar 16;93(6):064044. Cited 192 times *Wall AC. Proof of the generalized second law for rapidly changing fields and arbitrary horizon slices. Physical Review D. 2012 May 29;85(10):104049. Cited 178 timed

Personal life

According to his website, he is active in the New Life

Church of the Nazarene The Church of the Nazarene is an evangelical Christian denomination that emerged in North America from the 19th-century Wesleyan-Holiness movement within Methodism. It is headquartered in Lenexa within Johnson County, Kansas. With its membe ...

.Personal homepage
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References

External links

Personal homepage
{{DEFAULTSORT:Wall, Aron 1984 births Living people Quantum gravity physicists American relativity theorists Cambridge mathematicians St. John's College (Annapolis/Santa Fe) alumni University of Maryland, College Park alumni University of California, Santa Barbara people Institute for Advanced Study people Place of birth missing (living people) American members of the Church of the Nazarene