Major Publishes Paper with Takis ’26, McGovern ’25, and Scheuing ’24

The paper responds to the question “Is spacetime geometry granular?” Major said the paper reports on calculations of black hole entropy - roughly, the logarithm of the number of states required to assemble the black hole - in a framework in which the grains of geometry behave like quantum particles.  The calculations demonstrate that when the particles have these quantum properties there are too few states; the entropy is too low.  However, when the geometry is in the most likely state, it has quantized areas.

The consequences of these quantized areas are explored in a second paper on the preprint arXiv that Takis worked on, showing the black hole entropy may be sourced from fluctuations of geometry just outside the black hole.

Takis is a physics and mathematics major.