Eric Verlinde's latest bombshell is now making the news in popular media. In it, he is claiming that gravity is merely an "illusion" (I hate that word).
But what if it’s all an illusion, a sort of cosmic frill, or a side effect of something else going on at deeper levels of reality?
So says Erik Verlinde, 48, a respected string theorist and professor of physics at the University of Amsterdam, whose contention that gravity is indeed an illusion has caused a continuing ruckus among physicists, or at least among those who profess to understand it. Reversing the logic of 300 years of science, he argued in a recent paper, titled “On the Origin of Gravity and the Laws of Newton,” that gravity is a consequence of the venerable laws of thermodynamics, which describe the behavior of heat and gases.
String theorists have abandoned publishing in peer-reviewed journals? Well, why not? They can make huge waves simply by putting their speculations on ArXiv and get in the news.
Edit: interestingly enough, there are already counter argument against Verlinde's proposal.
Zz.
Which goes to show that it's so easy to make stuff up... :(
ReplyDeleteString theorists are indeed too strange to be practical......
ReplyDeleteI don't go well with their minds......
Of the most cogent arguments I've heard for why one shouldn't care about Verlinde's idea, some have come from string theorists. *shrug*
ReplyDelete. . . including, if one judges by the other arXiv eprints they have to their credit, the two authors of the no-go theorem linked in the original post.
ReplyDeleteeven einstein said that .if we read carefully the theory of relativity .we would seee that gravity is not a force but a consequence of the fact that space-time is not flat but curved by the distribution of mass and energy in it.bodies like earth are not made to move on curved orbits by gravity but they follow the nearest possible straight path in a curved space called geodesic.
ReplyDelete