The Census Taker's Hat

Abstract

If the observable universe really is a hologram, then of what sort? Is it rich enough to keep track of an eternally inflating multiverse? What physical and mathematical principles underlie it? Is the hologram a lower dimensional quantum field theory, and if so, how many dimensions are explicit, and how many "emerge?" Does the Holographic description provide clues for defining a probability measure on the Landscape? The purpose of this lecture is first, to briefly review a proposal for a holographic cosmology by Freivogel, Sekino, Susskind, and Yeh (FSSY), and then to develop a physical interpretation in terms of a "Cosmic Census Taker:" an idea introduced in reference [1]. The mathematical structure--a hybrid of the Wheeler DeWitt formalism and holography--is a boundary "Liouville" field theory, whose UV/IR duality is closely related to the time evolution of the Census Taker's observations. That time evolution is represented by the renormalization-group flow of the Liouville theory. Although quite general, the Census Taker idea was originally introduced in \cite{shenker}, for the purpose of counting bubbles that collide with the Census Taker's bubble. The "Persistence of Memory" phenomenon discovered by Garriga, Guth, and Vilenkin, has a natural RG interpretation, as does slow roll inflation. The RG flow and the related C-theorem are closely connected with generalized entropy bounds.