George Frederick Chapline Jr. (born May 6, 1942) is an American theoretical physicist, based at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

[4] Drawing upon quantum mechanical insights of himself and Pawel Mazur from the early 2000s, he proposed that objects currently thought to be black holes are actually dark-energy stars.

[5] Chapline and Mazur are also responsible for the only known exact result in quantum gravity; namely all rotating space-times can be constructed from an array of quantized spinning strings.

[6] This idea incorporates the 1980 proposal by Robert B. Laughlin and Chapline that the surface of a black hole actually represents a quantum critical transition of a superfluid vacuum.

The ideas which led to his Computing Anticipatory award from the U Liege in 2004 are described in his book “Quantum Mechanics and Bayesian Machines” published by World Scientific in 2023.