Wilson loops as precursors - art. no. 044001

There is substantial evidence that string theory on AdS(5) x S-5 is a holog raphic theory in which the number of degrees of freedom scales as the area of the boundary in Planck units. Precisely how the theory can describe bulk physics using only surface degrees of freedom is not well understood. A pa rticularly paradoxical situation involves an event deep in the interior of the bulk space. The event must be recorded in the (Schrodinger picture stat e) vector of the boundary theory long before a signal, such as a gravitatio nal wave, can propagate from the event to the boundary. In a previous paper with Polchinski, we argued that the ''precursor'' operators which cam, inf ormation stored in the wave during the lime when it vanishes in a neighborh ood of the boundary are necessarily non-local. In this paper we argue that the precursors cannot be products of local gauge invariant operators such a s the energy momentum tensor. In fact gauge theories have a class of intrin sically non-local operators which cannot be built from local gauge invarian t objects. These are the Wilson loops. We show that the precursors can be i dentified with Wilson loops whose spatial size is dictated by the UV-IR con nection.