epoch: 1267875420
Today I read a very interesting paper recently published by Erik Verlinde. In this paper he proposes to treat gravity no longer to be a fundamental force. Instead it should be seen as an emergent macroscopic phenomenon due to some underlying microscoping events. And since space and time are closely related to gravity they should be seen as emergent as well.
By obviously having only the second law of thermodynamics and the holographic principle postulated he shows how to derive newton’s and einstein’s equations from a correspondence of entropy and temperature on one side and mass, gravity and space(-time) on the other. Here entropy is defined in terms of degrees of freedom of some microscopic theory with no further specification of that theory. Forces and motions are driven by gradients of entropy.
This ansatz is very appealing. It’s evidence is supported by at least the AdS/CFT duality and the black hole entropy due to Beckenstein. The ansatz is also simple. Verlinde puts some existing insights together and reinterprets the physical meaning to get a new one: gravity is not fundamental. This looks like a pattern of theoretical revolution. Is this the pattern of what Heidegger called “Lichtung des Seins”? The new is already out there, but it has to be shown to be and while shown Being unfolds. Is that a kind of Ereignis where the world is displaced?
If Verlinde’s ideas hold there seems to be no need for quantizing gravity anymore. The holy grail of todays physics simply does not exist? Not really surprisingly, the paper is widely discussed in the physical community with a lot of criticism. It is very interesting to follow these discussions.
Also, a number of questions pops up immediately. For example, it would be interesting to see how the non-locality of the quantum world fits into this framework. Is causality emergent as well? Is it a consequence of the second law?
Reference:
Erik Verlinde: On the Origin of Gravity and the Laws of Newton [http://arxiv.org/abs/1001.0785]
Comment:
Non-locality is most obvious present in entanglement. And here is a paper bringing all this together: http://arxiv.org/abs/1002.4568.
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