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.

"Dr. Verlinde, respected string theorist ..."

"Respected string theorist". Add it to jumbo shrimp, military
intelligence and other oxymorons.

yeah, stringtheory is cool; just ask Michio
"I'm a Respected Star Trek Science Consultant" Kaku,
and very well-paid, I'm sure. well, he might not
put it that way ... how many T-shirt versions
has he published, so far?

ne, Kaluza 5d "4+1" spacetime,
rechristened with one compactified dimension
by Klein -- *a* Klein, at any rate, maybe
not Alvin "the original blankety-blank stringguy" Klein.

"blankety-blank string theorist"

thus&so:
missed the characterization of Fermat primes by finitessimal.
look for m = a + b with m, a, b in the set
of numbers k such that 6 k +- 1 are twin primes.
If it comforts you: a very great deal; thanks!

thus&so:
and Gauss said, numbertheory, implicitly implying that
there was a king of the sciences ... probably co-equal.
so, what is the surfer's canonical value of pi; like,
can you prove it?
"Psychology, the queen of sciences" is her, saith Nietzsche.

um, statistics, not, king; thank *you*.

thus&so:
oops; I meant, of course, as discovered in the 2nd and
the 0th millennia c.e. -- God-am period.
guru-nG-forces say, Go jump into a deep, clear pool of spacetime!

thus&so:
whoah, time-lapse satellite views; synthetic aperature radar,
scanning the Face on Mars get-together ... look,
I see him -- it's Dick, and he appears to be talking
to himself, but y'never know with "digital;" yeah,
I'm very sure that the Face will eventually resolve
into Dick Hoagland, age three, kind-of like in 2001,
The Movie dot company. or, the Hyperdimensional OrangeClockWorks?
[PS: finally, it turned out to be, good-ol' Vectr'n'Scalr;
they found it on Vger in that episode -- just tell everyone,
all of our math, Carl .-]
as for surfer's statement, you didn't include it and
I often do not deign to link to strange googol results --
what am I, the Math Marketing Board ... I mean,
I went to the last meeting, which was also the first one,
and why haven't I received my damn "per diem," yet?
well, I wonder which countries are going to take the dare,
to implement the pentagoogol to factor all numbers
of physical import, except for cryptoblats. or,
which innovative corporate start-ups? (Bucky F. had an idea
that was similar, if not completely bogus,
re "Scheherazade numbers" (I mean, as far as I could say,
it was absolutely bogus, but then, so was 17291...
esp. the factorial (172911 .-)

thus&so:
wow, a parallelotope associated with *every* Hilbert space?
Geometric embeddings of metric spaces by Juha Heinonen.

thus&so:
yes, and prime gaps, sounds as if it could be related
to prime frequencies -- yahoo! (tm)
seriously, you're just talking about Venn diagrams; eh?
There is only one; one is the loneliest number1

really, truly saith1

--BP's Next Bailout of Wall St. etc. ad vomitorium,
Waxman's *new* cap&trade (circa '91).
http://wlym.com