Tuesday 12th May 2026, 6.30pm, Sibson Lecture Theatre 3
Ginestra Bianconi (Queen Mary University, of London)
Inspired by Stephen Hawking’s remark that “the next century will be the century of complexity,” this lecture explores why our era can equally be understood as the century of information. Central to this perspective is the concept of entropy, originating in Ludwig Boltzmann’s statistical mechanics and later developed by John von Neumann, Claude Shannon, and Edwin Jaynes.
Statistical mechanics and information theory now form a unifying framework for understanding systems across physics, biology, and technology—from quantum matter to networks and artificial intelligence. They reveal how simple microscopic interactions give rise to complex collective behavior, reflecting Philip W. Anderson’s insight that “more is different.”
This lecture will explore how these ideas connect disciplines and address a deeper question: is statistical mechanics simply a tool for describing complexity, or a fundamental framework for nature itself? This was first envisioned by John Archibald Wheeler’s “It from bit” pioneering idea. The talk will conclude with recent developments at the interface of gravity, statistical mechanics, and quantum information theory including entropic gravity approaches and the novel Gravity from Entropy theory.
About the speaker
Ginestra Bianconi is Professor of Applied Mathematics at Queen Mary University of London. She is an American Physical Society Fellow, a member of the European Academy of Sciences and recipient of the 2025 Euler Prize. Her research activity focuses on statistical mechanics, network theory, gravity and the links between all of these areas.
The talk is free and open to all. Doors open about half an hour before the talk begins.
Optional registration – if you wish to register, you can do so at the Institute of Physics web pages (link to be added when registration page is live).
For directions to the lecture theatre, see here.