Welcome to the course

Welcome

This is the webpage of the course "Gravitation and Quantum Entanglement" which is aimed at Ph.D. and advanced Master's students at IISER Pune.

The goal of the course is to survey the connection between two apparently unrelated fields: Gravitation (General Relativity) and Quantum Entanglement. These are two very important and fascinating areas of Physics, and each one has been extensively studied on its own for around a century. In recent years, very unexpected connections have been uncovered between them, which provide new insights into each area using results from the other one. Thus, this course could be of interest to students planning to work either on Gravitation or on Quantum Entanglement, or any other related fields.

The contents of the lectures, together with references, will be provided in a separate post. I hope to update them regularly.

As it is a survey course, not all results will be derived, though in many cases derivations will be provided. I hope the course will stimulate students to study and work out more details and topics on their own later.

Who can attend

Anyone in IISER is welcome to attend any of the lectures. My permission is not required (unless the room becomes full, which is unlikely).

Registration and evaluation

Formal registration is only open to Ph.D. students. For the course evaluation, each registered student will pick a topic (during discussion with me) on which to write a term paper. This will have to be presented in front of everyone towards the end of the course.

How to receive updates

Because there may be several auditing students, my preferred mode of communication with you is through this blog rather than directly by email. Please subscribe to it, then you will be notified of any post that I put up. If there are any changes or cancellations in lecture dates, they will be communicated here. Students can put up questions or comments on any post, I will moderate each one before it is published.

Duration, days, venue

There will be two lectures of 75 minutes per week. The course will have 12 lectures in total (plus one or two extra if necessary).

All the lectures will be held in Physics Seminar Room 31 unless announced otherwise. The dates and times are:

Tuesdays 5:15-6:30 PM

Wednesdays 1:45-3:00 PM

Use of AI

Use of LLMs will be important in this course. I am treating this as an opportunity to see how much constructive use can be made of them. I have taken the help of Claude Opus 5 to prepare the syllabus and will keep discussing details with it as the course progresses.

I would encourage every student attending the course to make a free account on at least one LLM (I personally use ChatGPT and Claude) and choose the settings so that all your chats are permanently saved, so that you can go back to them later. You are free to form groups and share chats. Let us try to improve our ability to come up with interesting questions and maximise our understanding. I hope this will create a useful template for teaching and research in the future, which will be heavily influenced by AI.

Everyone knows that LLMs make mistakes and even talk nonsense sometimes. This is not a reason to run away from them. Students are expected to develop the ability to spot mistakes, challenge the LLM, and extract useful and correct answers. This may be the most important survival skill of the future.

From my side there are no limits to how much you may use the LLM. Since the course has no exam, the question of cheating does not arise. Registered students may use LLMs to help prepare their term paper, though I feel the writing should be done by the student in their own words. The assessment will be based on their live presentation and ability to answer questions, including about fine details.