Can One Understand Black Hole Entropy without Knowing Much about Quantum Gravity?

TL;DR

This paper reviews approaches suggesting that understanding black hole entropy might be possible without detailed knowledge of quantum gravity, focusing on low-energy thermodynamic features and general theoretical proposals.

Contribution

It surveys recent proposals indicating black hole entropy can be understood through low-energy and thermodynamic principles without full quantum gravity details.

Findings

Black hole thermodynamics is a low-energy phenomenon.

Some approaches successfully explain entropy without quantum gravity details.

Recent results support the idea of understanding entropy through general features.

Abstract

It is a common belief now that the explanation of the microscopic origin of the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy of black holes should be available in quantum gravity theory, whatever this theory will finally look like. Calculations of the entropy of certain black holes in string theory do support this point of view. In the last few years there also appeared a hope that an understanding of black hole entropy may be possible even without knowing the details of quantum gravity. The thermodynamics of black holes is a low energy phenomenon, so only a few general features of the fundamental theory may be really important. The aim of this review is to describe some of the proposals in this direction and the results obtained.