Some observations on the degrees of freedom of quantum gravity

Recent work has made it clear that gravity is an example of an emergent phenomenon: there exists a large number of strongly interacting, microscopic degrees of freedom and gravity is merely an approximate long- distance description of these degrees of freedom. The situation is somewhat analogous to thermodynamics, which is also an approximate description of the collective behavior of many microscopic degrees of freedom. I will describe some recent progress in this area, including possible implications for black hole physics, and tantalizing connections with notions originally developed in the context of quantum information theory.