Black holes

How should we understand black holes at a quantum mechanical level? In the past years, we have made dramatic progress in answering this question, from a better understanding of how information can escape from a black hole to exact gravitational calculations of black hole entropies. In this talk, I will describe some of the advancements we have made in understanding black hole thermodynamics: I will describe how quantum gravity corrections drastically alter the physics of black holes at low temperatures, how such effects completely change the dynamical evolution of a single charged black hole when left alone to evaporate, and how, in special cases, we can now compute the entropy of black holes with arbitrary precision without relying on a UV completion of quantum gravity. Along the way, I will point out several parallels between phenomena that we have seen in the past century in atomic physics and novel effects that we can now explicitly compute for black holes.