Issues+to+Discuss

**Brain Storm Outcome : main questions to be discussed during this workshop**
The main questions that appeared during our meeting can be found in the set of photos below (8 photos: 1 for each panel of the blackboard and a final photo showing the entire board at once). The full audio & video recording of the discussion is available at [].

Blue boxes (without stars) are items which we suggested to be ripe for progress in the near term.

Blue boxes with stars are items which may be hard to tackle, but on which participants would nevertheless like to focus.

All items with boxes are listed as potential (and now some!) working groups at http://bitbranes12.wikispaces.com/Working+groups. Please feel free to join any or all of these groups by signing up on that page and contacting the chair(s).









Some questions for discussion (some of which may already have been answered …)
(contributed by S. Giddings)


 * What are good, sharp questions in quantum gravity?
 * How can one formulate local observables, in some approximation?
 * Is black hole evolution unitary?
 * What is wrong with Hawking's argument/the nice slice argument for info. loss?
 * Does unitary evolution for black hole formation/evaporation require departures from usual locality?
 * Do string theory effects provide such nonlocality?
 * Does string theory/AdS-CFT sharply resolve the information problem? If so, how do we show this?
 * If a bit falls into a black hole, on what time scale does its information begin to be emitted?
 * What features of the high-energy S-matrix follow from properties of gravity?
 * Do we find related puzzles (and resolutions) in black holes and quantum cosmology?

For a more lengthy set of related questions from a workshop five years ago, see http://web.physics.ucsb.edu/~giddings/sbgw/Introduction.pdf