Ivano Basile: Asymptotic safety, quantum gravity, and the swampland: a conceptual assessment

The swampland program attempts to elucidate and organize our understanding of quantum gravity from the bottom up. In light of its developments, I will present a conceptual assessment of the asymptotic safety scenario, collecting, connecting and revisiting several considerations scattered in the literature. The main upshot of the resulting arguments is a structural tension between a field-theoretic description of gravity and the statistical mechanics of black-hole microstates and holography, which an effective formulation of asymptotically safe gravity can avoid.