Every Day More Physicists Are Coming Closer To The Truth AboutGravity / S D Rodrian

I have been explaining the fact that
gravity is purely/only an effect of
thermodynamics since the turn of the
century! [Google: "sdrodrian" SEE:
http://physics.sdrodrian.com ] So
it is certainly gratifying to see that
some people are finally beginning
to wake up and slowly crawl... up to
the knowledge which is all already
fully explained at my website! Frankly,
I thought I'd never see this much
agreement with my ideas in my own
lifetime. But the world does move
at its own pace,

S D Rodrian



Is Gravity Real? A Scientist Takes On Newton
Elwood H. Smith By DENNIS OVERBYE
Published: July 12, 2010 The New York Times

It’s hard to imagine a more fundamental and
ubiquitous aspect of life on the Earth than gravity,
from the moment you first took a step and fell
on your diapered bottom to the slow terminal
sagging of flesh and dreams.

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.

“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.

Some of the best physicists in the world say
they don’t understand Dr. Verlinde’s paper,
and many are outright skeptical. But some
of those very same physicists say he has
provided a fresh perspective on some of the
deepest questions in science, namely why
space, time and gravity exist at all — even
if he has not yet answered them.

“Some people have said it can’t be right,
others that it’s right and we already knew it
— that it’s right and profound, right and
trivial,” Andrew Strominger, a string theorist
at Harvard said.

“What you have to say,” he went on, “is that
it has inspired a lot of interesting discussions.
It’s just a very interesting collection of ideas
that touch on things we most profoundly do
not understand about our universe. That’s
why I liked it.”

Dr. Verlinde is not an obvious candidate to go
off the deep end. He and his brother Herman,
a Princeton professor, are celebrated twins
known more for their mastery of the
mathematics of hard-core string theory than
for philosophic flights.

Born in Woudenberg, in the Netherlands, in
1962, the brothers got early inspiration from
a pair of 1970s television shows about particle
physics and black holes. “I was completely
captured,” Dr. Verlinde recalled. He and his
brother obtained Ph.D’s from the University
of Utrecht together in 1988 and then went to
Princeton, Erik to the Institute for Advanced
Study and Herman to the university. After
bouncing back and forth across the ocean,
they got tenure at Princeton. And, they married
and divorced sisters. Erik left Princeton for
Amsterdam to be near his children.

He made his first big splash as a graduate
student when he invented Verlinde Algebra
and the Verlinde formula, which are important
in string theory, the so-called theory of
everything, which posits that the world is
made of tiny wriggling strings.

You might wonder why a string theorist is
interested in Newton’s equations. After all
Newton was overturned a century ago by
Einstein, who explained gravity as warps in
the geometry of space-time, and who some
theorists think could be overturned in turn
by string theorists.

Over the last 30 years gravity has been
“undressed,” in Dr. Verlinde’s words, as a
fundamental force.

This disrobing began in the 1970s with the
discovery by Jacob Bekenstein of the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem and Stephen Hawking
of Cambridge University, among others, of
a mysterious connection between black holes
and thermodynamics, culminating in Dr.
Hawking’s discovery in 1974 that when
quantum effects are taken into account black
holes would glow and eventually explode.

In a provocative calculation in 1995, Ted
Jacobson, a theorist from the University of
Maryland, showed that given a few of these
holographic ideas, Einstein’s equations of
general relativity are just a another way
of stating the laws of thermodynamics.

Those exploding black holes (at least in
theory — none has ever been observed) lit
up a new strangeness of nature. Black holes,
in effect, are holograms — like the 3-D
images you see on bank cards. All the
information about what has been lost inside
them is encoded on their surfaces. Physicists
have been wondering ever since how this
“holographic principle” — that we are all
maybe just shadows on a distant wall —
applies to the universe and where it came
from.

In one striking example of a holographic
universe, Juan Maldacena of the Institute
for Advanced Study constructed a
mathematical model of a “soup can” universe,
where what happened inside the can,
including gravity, is encoded in the label on
the outside of the can, where there was
no gravity, as well as one less spatial
dimension. If dimensions don’t matter and
gravity doesn’t matter, how real can they be?

Lee Smolin, a quantum gravity theorist at
the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics,
called Dr. Jacobson’s paper “one of the most
important papers of the last 20 years.”

But it received little attention at first, said
Thanu Padmanabhan of the Inter-University
Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics in
Pune, India, who has taken up the subject
of “emergent gravity” in several papers over
the last few years. Dr. Padmanabhan said
that the connection to thermodynamics went
deeper that just Einstein’s equations to other
theories of gravity. “Gravity,” he said
recently in a talk at the Perimeter institute,
“is the thermodynamic limit of the statistical
mechanics of “atoms of space-time.”

Dr. Verlinde said he had read Dr. Jacobson’s
paper many times over the years but that
nobody seemed to have gotten the message.
People were still talking about gravity as a
fundamental force. “Clearly we have to take
these analogies seriously, but somehow no
one does,” he complained.

His paper, posted to the physics archive in
January, resembles Dr. Jacobson’s in many
ways, but Dr. Verlinde bristles when people
say he has added nothing new to Dr.
Jacobson’s analysis. What is new, he said,
is the idea that differences in entropy can
be the driving mechanism behind gravity,
that gravity is, as he puts it an “entropic force.”

That inspiration came to him courtesy of a
thief. As he was about to go home from a
vacation in the south of France last summer,
a thief broke into his room and stole his
laptop, his keys, his passport, everything.
“I had to stay a week longer,” he said, “I got
this idea.” Up the beach, his brother got a
series of e-mail messages first saying that
he had to stay longer, then that he had a
new idea and finally, on the third day, that
he knew how to derive Newton’s laws from
first principles, at which point Herman
recalled thinking, “What’s going on here?
What has he been drinking?” When they
talked the next day it all made more sense,
at least to Herman. “It’s interesting,”
Herman said, “how having to change plans
can lead to different thoughts.”

Think of the universe as a box of scrabble
letters. There is only one way to have the
letters arranged to spell out the Gettysburg
Address, but an astronomical number of
ways to have them spell nonsense. Shake
the box and it will tend toward nonsense,
disorder will increase and information will
be lost as the letters shuffle toward their
most probable configurations. Could this
be gravity?

As a metaphor for how this would work,
Dr. Verlinde used the example of a polymer
— a strand of DNA, say, a noodle or a hair
— curling up. “It took me two months to
understand polymers,” he said. The resulting
paper, as Dr. Verlinde himself admits, is a
little vague. “This is not the basis of a
theory,” Dr. Verlinde explained. “I don’t
pretend this to be a theory. People should
read the words I am saying opposed to
the details of equations.” Dr. Padmanabhan
said that he could see little difference
between Dr. Verlinde’s and Dr. Jacobson’s
papers and that the new element of an entropic
force lacked mathematical rigor. “I doubt
whether these ideas will stand the test of
time,” he wrote in an e-mail message from
India. Dr. Jacobson said he couldn’t make
sense of it.

John Schwarz of the California Institute of
Technology, one of the fathers of string theory,
said the paper was “very provocative.” Dr.
Smolin called it, “very interesting and also
very incomplete.”

At a workshop in Texas in the spring, Raphael
Bousso of the University of California, Berkeley,
was asked to lead a discussion on the paper.
“The end result was that everyone else didn’t
understand it either, including people who
initially thought that did make some sense to
them,” he said in an e-mail message. “In any
case, Erik’s paper has drawn attention to what
is genuinely a deep and important question,
and that’s a good thing,” Dr. Bousso went on,
“I just don’t think we know any better how
this actually works after Erik’s paper. There
are a lot of follow-up papers, but unlike Erik,
they don’t even understand the problem.”

The Verlinde brothers are now trying to recast
these ideas in more technical terms of string
theory, and Erik has been on the road a bit,
traveling in May to the Perimeter institute and
Stony Brook University on Long Island,
stumping for the end of gravity. Michael Douglas,
a professor at Stony Brook, described
Dr. Verlinde’s work as “a set of ideas that
resonates with the community, adding,
“everyone is waiting to see if this can be
made more precise.”

Until then the jury of Dr. Verlinde’s peers
will still be out. Over lunch in New York,
Dr. Verlinde ruminated over his experiences
of the last six months. He said he had simply
surrendered to his intuition. “When this
idea came to me, I was really excited and
euphoric even,” Dr. Verlinde said. “It’s not
often you get a chance to say something
new about Newton’s laws. I don’t see
immediately that I am wrong. That’s
enough to go ahead.” He said friends
had encouraged him to stick his neck out
and that he had no regrets. “If I am proven
wrong, something has been learned anyway.
Ignoring it would have been the worst thing.”

The next day Dr. Verlinde gave a more
technical talk to a bunch of physicists in
the city. He recalled that someone had
told him the other day that the unfolding
story of gravity was like the emperor’s new
clothes.

“We’ve known for a long time gravity doesn’t
exist,” Dr. Verlinde said, “It’s time to yell it.”
END QUOTE

Welcome to the club, Dr. Verlinde.

S D Rodrian
http://sdrodrian.com
http://physics.sdrodrian.com
http://mp3.sdrodrian.com
http://caruso.sdrodrian.com

All religions are local.
Only science is universal.

"SD" wrote in message...
...

I have been explaining the fact that
gravity is purely/only an effect of
thermodynamics since the turn of the
century! . . .

.. . .
“We’ve known for a long time gravity doesn’t
exist,” Dr. Verlinde said, “It’s time to yell it.”
END QUOTE

Welcome to the club, Dr. Verlinde.

S D Rodrian
http://sdrodrian.com
http://physics.sdrodrian.com
http://mp3.sdrodrian.com
http://caruso.sdrodrian.com

All religions are local.
Only science is universal.

P I T A P I T A P I T A P I T A P I T A P I T A P I T A

For something that "doesn't exist" gravity seems to have a lot
of interesting effects upon us and upon matter in general.

Rodrian, i have read this and some of your other works, and i
have been reading you for many years on and off. I wonder if
you can condense your work on gravity so that it would fit on
a single, 8.5x11 sheet of paper in readable font, and so that it
would have an extreme impact on myself and others?

Notice, i did *not* ask you to "summarize" your work. This is
not a summary that i ask you for, this is a condensation of the
subject into a brief, but powerful description that has great
*impact* on the reader. That's up to you, of course. But i am
only a layman with a deep, abiding love of astronomy and other
sciences. And i feel that the main area where science *fails*
terribly is in the ability of scientists to convert their jargon into
lay language. I sometimes wonder if the reason they don't do
this is because they do not want to undergo what Einstein and
other scientists went through as a result of the detonation of
nuclear bombs near the end of WWII.

I suppose that i would rather believe *that* than to believe
that today's scientists are utterly incapable of making the
conversion.

At any rate, i believe that the greatest impact of your work is
for you to be able to describe, and note not just the "effect(s)"
of gravitation as much of today's science does, but also the
*"CAUSE(s)"* of the effect(s). And do this using a "simple"
example, such as the following...

Any model that has as its goal the description of both cause
and effect of gravitation would have to explain what it is about
a star that contains the superbly tremendous FORCE powered
by nuclear fusion at the core of the star. Presently, relativistic
explanations tell us that gravity is not a force, but an "effect".
And the "effect" is that "mass curves space". And that's it.
That's all that science can tell us that i understand. The rest
seems to be a lot of theoretical gibberish that sounds very
much like a foreign language to me. And, of course, what is
said, i.e., that gravity is an effect rather than a force, and that
gravity is the result of matter curving space, raises questions
in the mind of the layman, as you might expect.

So how does an "effect" contain the tremendous outward
FORCE of the matter contained within the sphere of a star?
How is the "curving of space" by the matter of the star able
to bring about the containment of all that outward pushing
matter? How is it that we are asked to accept that a star is
responsible for BOTH the outward pressure of matter and
energy AND the inward pressure of gravitation? HOW and
WHY would a star do BOTH?

And that's just for starters !

happy days and...
starry starry nights!

--
Indelibly yours,
Paine Ellsworth

P.S. "What you do makes a difference, and you only need
to decide what kind of difference you want to make."
Jane Goodall

P.P.S.: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Paine_Ellsworth

On Jul 13, 3:56*am, "Painius" wrote:
"SD" wrote in message...

...

I have been explaining the fact that
gravity is purely/only an effect of
thermodynamics since the turn of the
century! . . .

. . .
“We’ve known for a long time gravity doesn’t
exist,” Dr. Verlinde said, “It’s time to yell it.”
END QUOTE

* *Welcome to the club, Dr. Verlinde.

* *S D Rodrian
* *http://sdrodrian.com
* *http://physics.sdrodrian.com
* *http://mp3.sdrodrian.com
* *http://caruso.sdrodrian.com

* *All religions are local.
* *Only science is universal.

* P I T A * P I T A * P I T A * P I T A * P I T A * P I T A * P I T A

For something that "doesn't exist" gravity seems to have a lot
of interesting effects upon us and upon matter in general.

Rodrian, i have read this and some of your other works, and i
have been reading you for many years on and off. *I wonder if
you can condense your work on gravity so that it would fit on
a single, 8.5x11 sheet of paper in readable font, and so that it
would have an extreme impact on myself and others?

Notice, i did *not* ask you to "summarize" your work. *This is
not a summary that i ask you for, this is a condensation of the
subject into a brief, but powerful description that has great
*impact* on the reader. *That's up to you, of course. *But i am
only a layman with a deep, abiding love of astronomy and other
sciences. *And i feel that the main area where science *fails*
terribly is in the ability of scientists to convert their jargon into
lay language. *I sometimes wonder if the reason they don't do
this is because they do not want to undergo what Einstein and
other scientists went through as a result of the detonation of
nuclear bombs near the end of WWII.

I suppose that i would rather believe *that* than to believe
that today's scientists are utterly incapable of making the
conversion.

At any rate, i believe that the greatest impact of your work is
for you to be able to describe, and note not just the "effect(s)"
of gravitation as much of today's science does, but also the
*"CAUSE(s)"* of the effect(s). *And do this using a "simple"
example, such as the following...

Any model that has as its goal the description of both cause
and effect of gravitation would have to explain what it is about
a star that contains the superbly tremendous FORCE powered
by nuclear fusion at the core of the star. *Presently, relativistic
explanations tell us that gravity is not a force, but an "effect".
And the "effect" is that "mass curves space". *And that's it.
That's all that science can tell us that i understand. *The rest
seems to be a lot of theoretical gibberish that sounds very
much like a foreign language to me. *And, of course, what is
said, i.e., that gravity is an effect rather than a force, and that
gravity is the result of matter curving space, raises questions
in the mind of the layman, as you might expect.

So how does an "effect" contain the tremendous outward
FORCE of the matter contained within the sphere of a star?
How is the "curving of space" by the matter of the star able
to bring about the containment of all that outward pushing
matter? *How is it that we are asked to accept that a star is
responsible for BOTH the outward pressure of matter and
energy AND the inward pressure of gravitation? *HOW and
WHY would a star do BOTH?

And that's just for starters !

happy days and...
* *starry starry nights!

--
Indelibly yours,
Paine Ellsworth

P.S. *"What you do makes a difference, and you only need
* * * * *to decide what kind of difference you want to make."
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Jane Goodall

P.P.S.: *http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Paine_Ellsworth

Inertia and gravity the same stuff. Accelerating motion is equaL TO
BOTH Those are the big clues. All other forces are faces of gravity
Then we have G=EMC^2 Then we have my GUT that shows a 5th force is
needed to create universes. TreBert

On 13/07/2010 13:12, bert wrote:
[snip]

Inertia and gravity the same stuff. [snip]

If you can prove that, there's a Nobel Prize in Sweden just waiting
for you.

PRE
Gravity is primordial structure, eXergy; entropy eats it.
Besides you(Painius), who'd dare imagine it “doesn't exist� ?

Gravity is equal to all other forms of eXergy, combined;
if gravity doesn't exist, then neither does eXergy ―― the stuff of life.

The amount of eXergy/gravity we see to day is just fate;
giga·years ago it was much greater, giga·years from now it'll be less.

The cosmos is “alive� because it comsumes eXergy;
yet, at the same time, it “just is�, a static hyper(4·D)·block.

Intrinsically, nothing is random;
so·called “randomness� is just IGNORANCE, inadequate measurement.

On Jul 20, 10:28 am, JeffRelf.F-M.FM @. wrote:
Gravity is primordial structure, eXergy; entropy eats it. Besides you(Painius), who'd dare imagine it "doesn't exist" ? Gravity is equal to all other forms of eXergy, combined; if gravity doesn't exist, then neither does eXergy ---- the stuff of life. The amount of eXergy/gravity we see to day is just fate; giga·years ago it was much greater, giga·years from now it'll be less. The cosmos is "alive" because it comsumes eXergy; yet, at the same time, it "just is", a static hyper(4·D)·block. Intrinsically, nothing is random; so·called "randomness" is just IGNORANCE, inadequate measurement.

"Every Day More Physicists Are Coming Closer To The Truth About
Gravity / S D Rodrian"

PRE
No Brad, it's:
A hRef="http://groups.google.com/group/alt.astronomy/msg/63ed457ffeccf21b"So·called “randomness� is just IGNORANCE, inadequate measurement./A

On Jul 20, 10:50*am, JeffRelf.F-M.FM **@. wrote:
No Brad, it's:So·called “randomness” is just IGNORANCE, inadequate measurement.

"Every Day More Physicists Are Coming Closer To The Truth About
Gravity / S D Rodrian"

Just because you're a dysfunctional Mormon doesn't give you the right
to hijack topics by others, that is unless you've converted to being
Jewish.

The binding force(s) of gravity is not “randomness” nor is it anything
that you might have sufficient expertise as to convey anything better.

We currently do not know what's holding a proton or neutron together,
which isn't to say we'll never know unless it's you that's in charge
by continually renaming all the elements in order to suit whatever
makes a dysfunctional Mormon a happy camper. Of course, even if you
discovered the holy grail containing the DNA of Jesus Christ wouldn't
matter either, because you'd rename all of that so many multiple times
that it would all get lost in your dust.

~ BG

PRE
No Brad, it's:
A hRef="http://groups.google.com/group/alt.astronomy/msg/63ed457ffeccf21b"So·called “randomness� is just IGNORANCE, inadequate measurement./A

On Jul 20, 11:50*am, JeffRelf.F-M.FM **@. wrote:
No Brad, it's:So·called “randomness” is just IGNORANCE, inadequate measurement.

"Every Day More Physicists Are Coming Closer To The Truth About
Gravity / S D Rodrian"

Just because you're a dysfunctional Mormon doesn't give you the right
to hijack topics by others, that is unless you've converted to being
Jewish.

The binding force(s) of gravity is not “randomness” nor is it anything
that you might have sufficient expertise as to convey anything better.

We currently do not know what's holding a proton or neutron together,
which isn't to say we'll never know unless it's you that's in charge
by continually renaming all the elements in order to suit whatever
makes a dysfunctional Mormon a happy camper. Of course, even if you
discovered the holy grail containing the DNA of Jesus Christ wouldn't
matter either, because you'd rename all of that so many multiple times
that it would all get lost in your dysfunctional dust.

~ BG