Jonathan Oppenheim

Jonathan Oppenheim is a professor of physics at University College London. He is an expert in quantum information theory and quantum gravity.

Life
Oppenheim obtained a bachelor's degree at the University of Toronto in 1993 and PhD at the University of British Columbia in 2001. His PhD thesis titled Quantum Time, focused on time ordering in quantum mechanics and was supervised by Bill Unruh.

In 2004, he was a postdoctoral researcher under Jacob Bekenstein and a Royal Society University Fellow at the University of Cambridge before moving to University College London.

In 2005, together with Michał Horodecki and Andreas Winter, Oppenheim discovered quantum state-merging and used this primitive to show that quantum information could be negative. Following on this work, Oppenheim and collaborators have developed a resource theory for thermodynamics on the nano and quantum scale.

In 2017, Oppenheim and Lluis Masanes derived the third law of thermodynamics using quantum information arguments and set a bound to the speed at which information can be erased.

Oppenheim published a proposal in 2023 for a hybrid theory that couples classical general relativity with quantum field theory. According to this proposal, spacetime is not quantized but smooth and continuous, and is subject to random fluctuations.

Edible ballot society
As a student, Oppenheim was involved in the Edible Ballot Society which satirically advanced eating ballots to highlight the democracy gap in electoral politics. He was arrested at the 1997 APEC protests on University of British Columbia campus. He withdrew from the Commission for Public Complaints Against the RCMP following the refusal of the Prime Minister to testify. His group was responsible for smuggling a siege catapult into the medieval city of Quebec during the Summit of Americas, 2001. It was used to lob teddy bears.