I haven't read the Verlinde paper, but wanted to mention one of the papers it apparently builds on. That's Ted Jacobson's remarkable paper showing that gravity is a consequence of (1) thermodynamics and (2) the black hole entropy law. The paper is http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/9504004
One of these days, I want to try to sort out the major results and foundations in the major topics of physics in a big map, showing what has been shown to follow from what. Like the complexity zoology inclusion diagrams (http://www.math.ucdavis.edu/~greg/zoology/diagram.xml), only more general. I have the suspicion that a lot of the proofs of physics are in fact in some important way circular, but based on my first attempts I think I need to a computer to help me track all the logical dependencies.
We are at a point where belief in a god is probably at an all time low due to our greater understanding of science without the basics being to complex. Gravity is currently a simple enough concept that most people can understand it in a local context.
It will be interesting to see if in the future it is found that the laws of nature are much more complex than most of us can comprehend do more people again proclaim a god as the answer. Of course it could go the other way and we find nice formulas to better describe the universe.
On the one hand, gravity hasn't been 'real' since Einstein: it's a secondary effect due to the curvature of space. On the other hand, gravity has been real since long before Newton: we experience it rather directly. The editorialized title gives the impression that there are entirely new insights concerning the 'reality' of gravity and that is certainly not the case.
> "...but I have not been able to discover the cause of those properties of gravity from phænomena, and I frame no hypotheses; for whatever is not deduced from the phænomena is to have no place in experimental philosophy. To us it is enough that gravity does really exist, and acts according to the laws which we have explained."
--Sir Isaac Newton's _Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy_
"Scientist has hypothesized that gravity's origin may be somewhat different from previously considered, with no effect whatsoever on the real world" doesn't make for a very sensatinal headline.
Does anyone else find it ironic that the way we usually visualize the cause of gravity (wells or dents or pockets formed in the fabric of spacetime) depends on gravity to cause things to fall into the wells? In the absence of gravity, it makes no sense to expect things to fall into the well.
It sounds like you might be taking the 'bumpy surface' space-time metaphor too literally - I think it's only meant as an easy way to visualise the idea of curvature in more than three dimensions using our three-dimensional brains, rather than suggesting that there is actually a force acting perpendicular to the 'surface' the pulls objects into gravity wells.
Were that not the case, then, as you say, the external force required to make gravity work would be gravity itself, which is a bit like the homunculus theory of consciousness (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homunculus).
I would like to respectfully say that this article is only superficially appealing and therefore not proper for HN. This is just a hypothesis without mathematical basis. All you really need to read is the last few paragraphs to see that there isn't any mathematical rigor to it. This is a whole article about speculation about gravity, and it wastes a lot of time trying to hype up a physicist that won't flush out his math.
Since when does HN need mathematical rigor for hypotheses? I have never seen this standard applied to blog posts about how to be a leader, pitching your ideas, how to program, etc. All of which usually don't come with the statistical proof with which they should come if they want to make a scientific claim... It's all just insights and thoughts.
I haven't had a chance to go through the paper yet (http://arxiv.org/abs/1001.0785), but it seems that he does make some derivations and proof sketches. Can someone verify this?
I got through page 11 before loosing the plot, and it seems to be a very light mathematical treatment of the subject. More of a "what if we thought about it this way?" then a "here's the proof" type paper.
Yes, exactly. That's why it's worth talking about in the first place.
I wasn't downplaying the paper, just observing what I could about the current strength of its claims. It's more of a Gedankenexperiment with some guiding equations, which it seems the author stated as his intent in the nytimes article.
> You see articles stating that something broke the
> laws of physics when really it just didn't fit our
> current model of understanding.
It 'broke the law' in so much as it proved that the law was a 'broken' law (aka incomplete). It wasn't an action that violated a law, but a law that was rendered 'broken' by an action.
I'm not a physics major, but it appears superficial, non conclusive and light on math. At this point it's not a theory, but an (interesting as it may be) speculation.
This paper built upon work that Stephen Hawking did.
"The hypothesis of gravity being an entropic force has a history that goes back to research on black hole thermodynamics by Bekenstein and Hawking in the mid-1970s. These studies suggest a deep connection between gravity and thermodynamics."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_as_an_entropic_force
In order for anyone to take your opinion about what is proper for HN seriously you need to post it from an account that actually has an investment in HN.
Sabine Hossenfelder has some useful comments on Verlinde's work here: http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2010/03/gravity-is-entropy-...