# Gravity - NY Times Article on Newly-Postulated Definition **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [July 20, 2010, 6:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gravity-ny-times-article-on-newly-postulated-definition/547378 "2010-07-20T18:34:09Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![WordMan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/e8c25b/32.png) [@WordMan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/WordMan)\ **Post date:** [July 20, 2010, 6:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gravity-ny-times-article-on-newly-postulated-definition/547378/1 "2010-07-20T18:34:09Z")
Article [here](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/13/science/13gravity.htm). A quote from the article; > [@](#): > > “For me gravity doesn’t exist,” said Dr. Verlinde, who was recently in the United States to explain himself. Not that he can’t fall down, but Dr. Verlinde is among a number of physicists who say that science has been looking at gravity the wrong way and that there is something more basic, from which gravity “emerges,” the way stock markets emerge from the collective behavior of individual investors or that elasticity emerges from the mechanics of atoms. > > Looking at gravity from this angle, they say, could shed light on some of the vexing cosmic issues of the day, like the dark energy, a kind of anti-gravity that seems to be speeding up the expansion of the universe, or the dark matter that is supposedly needed to hold galaxies together. > > Dr. Verlinde’s argument turns on something you could call the “bad hair day” theory of gravity. > > It goes something like this: your hair frizzles in the heat and humidity, because there are more ways for your hair to be curled than to be straight, and nature likes options. So it takes a force to pull hair straight and eliminate nature’s options. Forget curved space or the spooky attraction at a distance described by Isaac Newton’s equations well enough to let us navigate the rings of Saturn, the force we call gravity is simply a byproduct of nature’s propensity to maximize disorder. Doper Physicists, what say you? ---
**Author:** ![Grey](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/b782af/32.png) [@Grey](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Grey)\ **Post date:** [July 20, 2010, 7:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gravity-ny-times-article-on-newly-postulated-definition/547378/2 "2010-07-20T19:02:23Z")
So basically complicated mathematics declares gravity an effect and not a basic framework of reality. Since it’s somewhat cool and different many people are ripping into theory to see if it breaks. Very neat stuff, looking forward to what we find out one way or the other. One of his papers for those that are interested [[1001.0785v1] On the Origin of Gravity and the Laws of Newton](http://arxiv.org/abs/1001.0785v1) ---
**Author:** ![Llama\_Llogophile](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/49beb7/32.png) [@Llama\_Llogophile](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Llama_Llogophile)\ **Post date:** [July 20, 2010, 7:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gravity-ny-times-article-on-newly-postulated-definition/547378/3 "2010-07-20T19:59:11Z")
I don’t understand what he’s saying at all yet, but I’m glad there’s some movement in this area. I’ve always found it interesting that, last I checked, nobody really knows anything about how gravity actually works. We can quantify the effects very precisely, but the actual mechanism by which gravity works is very mysterious. ---
**Author:** ![ChrisBooth12](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/e95f7d/32.png) [@ChrisBooth12](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ChrisBooth12)\ **Post date:** [July 20, 2010, 8:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gravity-ny-times-article-on-newly-postulated-definition/547378/4 "2010-07-20T20:02:24Z")
> [@Mach Tuck](#): > > I don’t understand what he’s saying at all yet, but I’m glad there’s some movement in this area. > > I’ve always found it interesting that, last I checked, nobody really knows anything about how gravity actually works. We can quantify the effects very precisely, but the actual mechanism by which gravity works is very mysterious. I also thought that it was because space bends depending on an objects mass and other objects are attracted by the said objects “bulge” in space is this not correct? Sorta like putting a nickel in one of those slots that makes it spin around and around the conde till it drops in the hole, i thought this was basically an orbit ---
**Author:** ![Cisco](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/ccd318/32.png) [@Cisco](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cisco)\ **Post date:** [July 20, 2010, 8:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gravity-ny-times-article-on-newly-postulated-definition/547378/5 "2010-07-20T20:02:40Z")
Kinda puts a funny spin on the “GRAVITY is a theory!” response to “evolution is just a theory” :D. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [July 20, 2010, 8:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gravity-ny-times-article-on-newly-postulated-definition/547378/6 "2010-07-20T20:16:05Z")
First of all, you’ll gain a better understanding of science if, as a general policy, you just always ignore everything published in the mainstream media like the NYT about science. Newspaper science articles generally oversimplify to the point that anything you could actually understand about them would be wrong. But with that said, so far as I can tell, this is just the holographic model of the Universe. And yes, gravity is an emergent property of the true underlying physics in such a model, and might be said to be an illusion, but it’s misleading to say that, since so is everything else that’s familiar about physics. ---
**Author:** ![Cheshire\_Human](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/5f8ce5/32.png) [@Cheshire\_Human](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cheshire_Human)\ **Post date:** [July 20, 2010, 8:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gravity-ny-times-article-on-newly-postulated-definition/547378/7 "2010-07-20T20:27:38Z")
It’s actually an old theory. I first heard it in high school 30 years ago: Gravity doesn’t exist. The Earth sucks. 😃 ---
**Author:** ![Brandus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/898d66/32.png) [@Brandus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Brandus)\ **Post date:** [July 20, 2010, 8:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gravity-ny-times-article-on-newly-postulated-definition/547378/8 "2010-07-20T20:36:29Z")
IANA a Physicist , but Dark Energy has always sounded suspiciously like the “Aether” theory of yesteryear. I feel like we’re still due for a breakthrough here a-la Galileo/Copernicus. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [July 20, 2010, 8:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gravity-ny-times-article-on-newly-postulated-definition/547378/9 "2010-07-20T20:47:59Z")
> [@](#): > > IANA a Physicist , but Dark Energy has always sounded suspiciously like the “Aether” theory of yesteryear. It’s not just you: One of the other names for dark energy (more precisely, one particular model of dark energy) is “quintessence”, literally “fifth element”, an old name for æther. And there are certainly other ways of treating the phenomenon than considering it to be a “substance” of some sort; it’s mostly for aesthetic reasons that the “substance” interpretation is currently the dominant one. ---
**Author:** ![John\_DiFool](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_difool/32/19543_2.png) [@John\_DiFool](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_DiFool)\ **Post date:** [July 20, 2010, 10:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gravity-ny-times-article-on-newly-postulated-definition/547378/10 "2010-07-20T22:37:15Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > First of all, you’ll gain a better understanding of science if, as a general policy, you just always ignore everything published in the mainstream media like the NYT about science. Newspaper science articles generally oversimplify to the point that anything you could actually understand about them would be wrong. Does that include their Tuesday Science section (which I read religiously)? ---
**Author:** ![Saltire](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/saltire/32/553_2.png) [@Saltire](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Saltire)\ **Post date:** [July 20, 2010, 10:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gravity-ny-times-article-on-newly-postulated-definition/547378/11 "2010-07-20T22:57:13Z")
Not a physicist, but an avid reader of popularizations. Recently, I’ve started to believe that there will be a breakthrough when someone figures out a new way of treating phenomena that does not go so far to simplify the situation. Most of physics is forced to treat objects as mathematically perfect spheres with a single perfect field acting upon them, isolated from a universe of other objects and forces. Newer physics takes more and more of the complexity of reality into account, but is still ignoring 95% of everything acting on whatever system is being studied. My barely-informed guess is that there is a whole new kind of physics that will come out of chaos theory and emergence, once someone finds the math needed. This thought about gravity being a condition of the universe that supports thermodynamic entropy could turn out to be a part of that breakthrough. ---
**Author:** ![PlainJain](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/5daacb/32.png) [@PlainJain](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PlainJain)\ **Post date:** [July 20, 2010, 11:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gravity-ny-times-article-on-newly-postulated-definition/547378/12 "2010-07-20T23:08:48Z")
I’ve never understood the gravity warping space idea. Seeing a bowling ball on a trampoline is using earth’s gravity to create artificial gravity that draws the baseball in. The baseball isn’t attracted to the bowling ball it’s just rolling down the hill that the bowling ball created. How does that work in three dimensions with no starting gravity? ---
**Author:** ![GIGObuster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gigobuster/32/421_2.png) [@GIGObuster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GIGObuster)\ **Post date:** [July 20, 2010, 11:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gravity-ny-times-article-on-newly-postulated-definition/547378/13 "2010-07-20T23:17:11Z")
So the “Lather, rinse, repeat” is not just a theory in a shampoo bottle, but a law of nature? 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![running\_coach](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/running_coach/32/15836_2.png) [@running\_coach](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/running_coach)\ **Post date:** [July 20, 2010, 11:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gravity-ny-times-article-on-newly-postulated-definition/547378/14 "2010-07-20T23:19:07Z")
Dude, that’s heavy. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [July 20, 2010, 11:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gravity-ny-times-article-on-newly-postulated-definition/547378/15 "2010-07-20T23:28:52Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > First of all, you’ll gain a better understanding of science if, as a general policy, you just always ignore everything published in the mainstream media like the NYT about science. Newspaper science articles generally oversimplify to the point that anything you could actually understand about them would be wrong. Ever try writing about a totally different field where the subject is pretty deep every week? It is not so easy, and I say that as someone who has been on both sides of the pen, as it were. But in this case I got the general impression that the writer really didn’t understand the subject at all. To be fair, neither did the other physicists quoted. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2010, 1:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gravity-ny-times-article-on-newly-postulated-definition/547378/16 "2010-07-21T01:01:13Z")
> [@](#): > > Not a physicist, but an avid reader of popularizations. Recently, I’ve started to believe that there will be a breakthrough when someone figures out a new way of treating phenomena that does not go so far to simplify the situation. > > Most of physics is forced to treat objects as mathematically perfect spheres with a single perfect field acting upon them, isolated from a universe of other objects and forces. Newer physics takes more and more of the complexity of reality into account, but is still ignoring 95% of everything acting on whatever system is being studied. > > My barely-informed guess is that there is a whole new kind of physics that will come out of chaos theory and emergence, once someone finds the math needed. This thought about gravity being a condition of the universe that supports thermodynamic entropy could turn out to be a part of that breakthrough. We already have all the math we need to model complicated shapes. It isn’t even actually any harder than the math needed for simple shapes like spheres. The problem isn’t that the math is so hard, just that there’s so much of it, so in practical terms, such things can only be done via computer. ---
**Author:** ![Der\_Trihs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/der_trihs/32/233_2.png) [@Der\_Trihs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Der_Trihs)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2010, 3:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gravity-ny-times-article-on-newly-postulated-definition/547378/17 "2010-07-21T03:20:13Z")
> [@PlainJain](#): > > I’ve never understood the gravity warping space idea. Seeing a bowling ball on a trampoline is using earth’s gravity to create artificial gravity that draws the baseball in. The baseball isn’t attracted to the bowling ball it’s just rolling down the hill that the bowling ball created. How does that work in three dimensions with no starting gravity? That’s more of a metaphor, to help people visualize it; it can’t be taken too far. As I understand it, in essence it works because that curved path is a geodesic, the curved space equivalent of a “straight line” - the path of least energy - because space is bent. Space is curved near Earth, so a satellite that orbits the Earth is following the curve. It would take the application of energy to make it move along any path besides that curve, just as in flat space it would take energy to divert it from a straight line path. ---
**Author:** ![Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/13edae/32.png) [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stranger_On_A_Train)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2010, 6:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gravity-ny-times-article-on-newly-postulated-definition/547378/18 "2010-07-21T18:30:44Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > It’s not just you: One of the other names for dark energy (more precisely, one particular model of dark energy) is “quintessence”, literally “fifth element”, an old name for æther. And there are certainly other ways of treating the phenomenon than considering it to be a “substance” of some sort; it’s mostly for aesthetic reasons that the “substance” interpretation is currently the dominant one. I’ve advanced the terms “atramentous corporeity” and “crepuscular palpitation” for dark matter and dark energy respectively, but they don’t seem to have caught on. The article seems to be a mishmash of pop-sci pseudo-jargon, but it does seem to be vaguely referencing the holographic principle. This is hardly groundbreaking; indeed, while general relativity works as a very accurate predictive model in a wide array of observations, it invokes a plenum (the pseudo-Reinmann manifold) upon which to define a metric tensor that describes the “geography” at that point in space-time. However, there is no physically measurable quality that is “space-time”; it is often referred to as a “fabric” and displayed as a wavy topographic grid, but in fact, it is the structure of “space” itself, and we have no idea what kind of stuff that is made of, except that it isn’t stuff. That the properties of this plenum are emergent properties of an underlying mechanic (and perhaps one that ties together all of the fundamental forces with gravitational forces and inertial resistance) isn’t novel or controversial, and in fact it is widely expected among physicists, although it may end up being something even less intuitive than “vibrating strings” or “blobs of probability” as the fundamental “stuff” of nature. Stranger ---
**Author:** ![WordMan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/e8c25b/32.png) [@WordMan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/WordMan)\ **Post date:** [July 22, 2010, 5:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gravity-ny-times-article-on-newly-postulated-definition/547378/19 "2010-07-22T17:39:35Z")
> [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](#): > > I’ve advanced the terms “atramentous corporeity” and “crepuscular palpitation” for dark matter and dark energy respectively, but they don’t seem to have caught on. > > The article seems to be a mishmash of pop-sci pseudo-jargon, but it does seem to be vaguely referencing the holographic principle. This is hardly groundbreaking; indeed, while general relativity works as a very accurate predictive model in a wide array of observations, it invokes a plenum (the pseudo-Reinmann manifold) upon which to define a metric tensor that describes the “geography” at that point in space-time. However, there is no physically measurable quality that is “space-time”; it is often referred to as a “fabric” and displayed as a wavy topographic grid, but in fact, it is the structure of “space” itself, and we have no idea what kind of stuff that is made of, except that it isn’t stuff. That the properties of this plenum are emergent properties of an underlying mechanic (and perhaps one that ties together all of the fundamental forces with gravitational forces and inertial resistance) isn’t novel or controversial, and in fact it is widely expected among physicists, although it may end up being something even less intuitive than “vibrating strings” or “blobs of probability” as the fundamental “stuff” of nature. > > Stranger I can’t believe I actually grasp that - thanks. And I am _so_ going to find a way to drop “crepuscular palpitation” into my next conversation, regardless of topic…😉 ---
**Author:** ![Pasta](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ecccb3/32.png) [@Pasta](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pasta)\ **Post date:** [July 22, 2010, 6:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gravity-ny-times-article-on-newly-postulated-definition/547378/20 "2010-07-22T18:09:42Z")
A few words to add to the above posters’ explications… \*First, entropy. \* Take a large pizza box and instead of putting a pizza in it, put in a hundred six-sided dice, all showing “1”. Close the box. If the box is disturbed in any way, the values of the dice will randomize a bit. If you look at the average value shown on the dice initially (1) and later (\>1), you’ll notice a trend. In particular, if you keep the box around for long enough, the average will approach 3.5. This is because there are way more possible states with an average near 3.5 than there are near any other value. As the system jumps “randomly” among possible states, the well-represented states will dominate the observations. So, with no complex dynamics introduced, the very nature of the “state space” leads to an emergent force that pushes the average toward 3.5. This is (part of) what entropy is all about – the preference for the most common states due solely to their commonness. In the above example, there are only 100 dice, so the number of possible states isn’t _too_ ridiculous. Thus, macroscopic deviations (e.g., observing average=3.4 once, then 2.9 later) are to be expected. When you start talking about atoms (where the number of participants is some large multiple of Avogadro’s number, 10[sup]24[/sup], and the number of states to be counted goes as, say, 2[sup]10[sup]24[/sup][/sup]), you quickly end up with a crisp macroscopic concept of entropy. _Holographic principle_. Imagine that physical space is not continuous but is instead a 3D grid of points. These points would be very close together, with the grid spacing perhaps near the Planck length, 10[sup]-35[/sup] m. Each grid point contains some information about what’s going on there. Naively, one would expect that the amount of information you could contain in a volume is equal to the number of grid points in the volume times the information per grid point. However, through some thermodynamic arguments that I’ll skip here, it can be shown that the information is limited to what could be contained on the boundary surrounding the volume – a much smaller amount. In other words, a 2D surface surrounding (say) the universe could have imprinted on it all the information needed to describe the goings-on in the 3D volume said surface surrounds. This is the holographic principle (so named because a hologram is a 2D film that contains all the information needed to see a 3D image). _Gravity emerges_. Verlinde has taken the step of demonstrating that, in the holographic scenario, the entropic forces (like with the dice) acting on the “surface” information could lead to interior (3D) dynamics that look like gravity. General Relativity would be a parametrization of the entropically induced emergent 3D behavior. Unexplained things (like the magnitude of the cosmological constant) could, one would hope, fall out more naturally in such a new paradigm. (I’ve used 2D and 3D here, but add another “D” for time wherever you’d like.) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gravity-ny-times-article-on-newly-postulated-definition/547378.md?page=2)