  Near horizons, quantum fields of low spin exhibit densities of states that
behave asymptotically like 1+1 dimensional conformal field theories. In
effective field theory, imposing some short-distance cutoff, one can compute
thermodynamic quantities associated with the horizon, and the leading cutoff
sensitivity of the heat capacity is found to equal to the leading cutoff
sensitivity of the entropy. One can also compute contributions to the
thermodynamic quantities from the gravitational path integral. For the
cosmological horizon of the static patch of de Sitter space, a natural
conjecture for the relevant heat capacity is shown to equal the
Bekenstein-Hawking entropy. These observations allow us to extend the
well-known notion of the generalized entropy to a generalized heat capacity for
the static patch of dS. The finiteness of the entropy and the nonvanishing of
the generalized heat capacity suggests it is useful to think about dS as a
state in a finite dimensional quantum gravity model that is not maximally
uncertain.
