It is common lore that quantum theory and gravity are somehow incompatible, and quantum gravity effects would anyway be so small that the subject is moot. This colloquium describes the theoretical status of quantum gravity, drawing on analogies with condensed matter physics and related research areas. It proceeds with identifying situations where quantum gravity effects are so large that they dominate, with examples from cosmology and black hole physics.
Finn Larsen received his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1996. After postdoctoral positions at the University of Pennsylvanian and the University of Chicago, he became faculty member at the University of Michigan in 2001. Larsen’s main research focus is on quantum gravity, especially black holes in string theory, but he is also works on quantum information theory and quantum computing.