Illusion of gravity

[PJ]

We have been talking about illusions alot lately, and string theory has come up in couple of threads. But I thought this article prompts its own thread.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/13/sc...vity.html?_r=1
By DENNIS OVERBYE
Published: July 12, 2010

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.

ZERO GRAVITY Dr. Erik Verlinde says, “For me gravity doesn’t exist.” In a recent paper he expounded on his theory.

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.

[Bi-Honar]

Within days of us talking about the String theory and illusions, you come across this article Mr. Ped. Coincidence? It's just as coincidental as Mr. A having a dream about Khamenei dying and logging in the next day to find my post about the Grand Ayatollahs becoming extinct. And there have been a few more of these actually mentioned on the forum in the past month or so. So, are all of these merely coincidences?

I think you already know my answer, but let me elaborate with a theory as interesting as Mr. Verlinde's. As I have mentioned many times before, both here and on the other forum, the Chaos theory deals with the dynamic systems where small variations in initial conditions or variables can produce significant variations to the end result. As an example, weather prediction algorithms can determine that a hurricane will take place on this side of the world, based on a butterfly flapping its wings on the other side of the world! In other words, the system is so complex and dynamic that a small enough variation in the input, like a butterfly flapping its wings, given the number of iterations, can produce such a significant variation in the output.

This is extremely interesting because the world we live in is nothing but a dynamic and complex system, not much different to those systems the Chaos theory is concerend with. Even more interesting is that the Chaos theory is concerned with deterministic systems and our world (the human part of it anyway) has become increasingly more deterministic over the millenia, so much so, that recently small input or software errors caused stock market crashes (one in Japan and one in NY), exactly as the Chaos theory would describe.

I've been talking about this for years and have repeatedly said that the mere power of thought in one small forum like IC, can bring about a revolution on the other side of the world (not to name any countries) and even that does not fully describe the power of the ultimate order that's prevalent to human chaos. I have a feeling we'll all be seeing more and more of these coincidences in the months to come - the only condition being to keep our eyes open.

[PJ]

I'm a bit familiar with Chaos theory. I know it is possible for me to lift a finger and that in itself could create a big change somewhere else. My problem is that I can never tell lifting which finger would do the right change for me.
To be honest though, the fact that I posted this article here, or even I read the article in the first place was because we had talked about String theory a few days ago. Otherwise I would have scanned the title and ignored it. It is natural for people to show interest in some words or topics if they have seen them before. And the title of this thread is different from the original title. I thought given the topics we have been discussing lately this was a better title.
I generally agree with what you say and the power of collective energy, but there is also some things that may seem like coincidence, while they are nothing but our reaction to something we have seen in the past.

[Bi-Honar]

Mr. Ped, the tittle doesn't say String theory in it and even if it did, the significant part is that it somehow relates two completely topics that we've been talking about.

[PJ]

Originally Posted by Bi-Honar

Mr. Ped, the tittle doesn't say String theory in it and even if it did, the significant part is that it somehow relates two completely topics that we've been talking about.

I know, but the illusion word was because of our discussions about your famous dog and pony show, that seems to have been just an illusion on my part!!