Konwersatorium im. Leopolda Infelda

The notion of distance between two points is at best a semiclassical concept. What replaces it in the fundamental theory of gravity? Recent progress in the AdS/CFT correspondence suggests a radically new way of approaching this problem, which is related to the information-theoretic quantity called entanglement entropy. I will review this development and discuss what it teaches us about the emergence of space and distance. Roughly, space appears to be a geometric representation of correlations between abstract, delocalized quantum gravity degrees of freedom.