Welcome Address to the Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Holography and its Applications: Baku, Azerbaijan

Distinguished colleagues, esteemed guests, and members of the broader scientific community, I welcome you to the proceedings of the fourth International Conference on Holography and its Applications at Khazar University.

We gather as theorists and experimentalists working across gravitational holography, quantum field theory in curved spacetime, and optical science. The premise of this meeting is straightforward and ambitious. When rigorous ideas are allowed to meet across subfields, they refine one another and understanding advances. Holography here is more than a metaphor. For instance, in high-energy theory, it has become a working language for unitarity, entropy, and the emergence of spacetime.

This conference is designed to keep these conversations proximate and mutually informative. Allow me to express gratitude before I begin. Our hosts at Khazar University have provided an environment where science can take precedence. The organizing community and volunteers have executed the quiet work of schedules, rooms, remote access, and the delicate choreography of microphones, slides, and discussion. To all invited speakers and contributors, your preparation makes the rest of this possible.

We are especially honoured to welcome—and thank in advance—Salvatore Capozziello, Robert B. Mann, Leonard Susskind, and Edward Witten.

Capozziello will deliver “Avoiding singularities in Lorentzian–Euclidean black holes: The role of atemporality,” a look at signature change and atemporality as routes to horizon regularization and singularity avoidance.

Mann will deliver “Doubly Holographic Quantum Black Holes,” an exploration of bulk–brane thermodynamics and the phase structure of quantum black holes in a doubly holographic framework.

Susskind, who will deliver “Observers in de Sitter Space,” an examination of physical observers (quantum reference frames) and their role in cosmological holography.

Witten, who will deliver “Introduction to black hole thermodynamics,” will provide a look at the laws, entropy, and quantum aspects that render black holes thermodynamic systems.

A few norms will help us earn the most from the following sessions. Questions should be as precise as equations, short, concrete, and oriented to the claim. Please indicate when you are offering an informed conjecture as distinct from a proven result. Speakers should foreground definitions and make explicit which approximations do the real work in the analysis.

The ideas migrate in the conference, error-correcting structures, informing gravitational reconstruction, quantum information metrics, Sharpen field theoretic intuition, and optical platforms offer analogs that can stress-test the theory. The program intentionally juxtaposes these strands to allow that migration to occur in real time, presented in Baku and around the world.

Science is international in two senses. The laws we study do not vary with jurisdiction, and the norms that allow that inquiry to flourish—openness, attribution, and respect—must travel with us. We will conduct these proceedings accordingly.

Extend collegiality across differences of approach and background; it improves the work and honours the people doing it. The most valuable outcome of any conference is not a slide deck, but a set of shared problems, clarified terms, and new collaborations. If by the close of these proceedings, we have a shorter list of confusions, a longer list of colleagues, and a few ideas, we will have succeeded. With that purpose in view, and on behalf of our hosts and organizers, may the discussions be exacting, the questions generous, and the results durable.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen is the publisher of In-Sight Publishing (ISBN: 978-1-0692343) and Editor-in-Chief of In-Sight: Interviews (ISSN: 2369-6885). He writes for The Good Men Project, International Policy Digest (ISSN: 2332–9416), The Humanist (Print: ISSN 0018-7399; Online: ISSN 2163-3576), Basic Income Earth Network (UK Registered Charity 1177066), A Further Inquiry, and other media. He is a member in good standing of numerous media organizations.

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