Black holes are fascinating objects from a theoretical, and also experimental, perspective. The main focus of this talk will be to explain some interesting features of black holes with large charge and low temperature: in the near-extremal limit. In this limit, their spectrum and dynamics are determined by a soft mode, called the Schwarzian mode, describing fluctuations in the geometry close to the black hole horizon. The physics of this mode and its relation to two-dimensional Anti-deSitter space was only elucidated recently in the past five years, and it also appears in condensed matter systems of non-Fermi liquids such as the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev models. This connection is a manifestation of the idea of holography, a hypothesis stating that black holes can be described as unitary quantum mechanical systems. Despite this, the gravitational description of black holes was thought not to make their unitarity manifest, an issue going under the name of the "information paradox". In the last part of the talk, I will explain recent progress towards understanding this issue, the role spacetime wormholes play in making some aspects of unitarity manifest from gravity, and other applications.
Video recording (uw only).