What is emergent gravity and how could it revolutionize physics? To understand

Emergence is a common feature of many concepts in physics. For example, temperature properties are not unique to gases; It is the result of countless microscopic collisions. In 2009, theoretical physicist Erik Verlinde proposed a reformulation of gravity, explaining that this force of nature could emerge from other hidden processes that we do not yet know about.

The emerging idea of ​​gravity depends on the connection between gravity and thermodynamicsHowever, scientists have not yet been able to understand whether this behavior is actually true.

If knowledge were real, gravity would not be the fundamental force of nature and would probably can only exist due to small pieces of information encoded in space-time surfaces; this is often called a holographic display.

Part of Verlinde’s theory was developed after understanding observations made by Stephen Hawking and Jacob Bekenstein in the 1970s; What happened was that some properties of black holes could be explained in terms of the laws of thermodynamics.

The researcher emphasizes that: The laws of thermodynamics emerge from microscopic processes and this information.Verlinde suggested that gravity could also arise from a deeper process.

“Emerging gravity has very strong claims: It can explain things like dark matter and dark energy, but it can also reproduce decades of work from regular general relativity. This last claim has now been refuted by our study, so advocates of emergent gravity in Changchun ( “We slow them down, not necessarily disable them,” physicist Zhi-Wei Wang of Jilin University (China) said in a post on the website. Physical.

emergency gravity

When Verlinde published the first version of the theory in 2009, he explained that because of statistical mechanics it was not necessary to know what these deeper processes were. in 2016 scientist expanded his theory by discovering that a universe with dark energy naturally gives rise to emerging features in space.

The scientist claims that In any region outside the Solar System, gravity will behave differently than explained by Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

Unfortunately, results from experiments on emerging gravity have been mixed. So, while some tests supported the theory, others distanced scientists from this idea of ​​different gravity. In any case, the hypothesis remains intriguing and needs to continue to be investigated by scientists, but it still needs to pass many tests to be confirmed as reality.

“The first steps are now being taken towards a new theoretical framework in which space-time geometry is seen to represent the entanglement structure of the microscopic quantum state. Gravity emerges from this quantum information theory perspective by describing the change in entanglement caused by matter,” Verlinde explains in his paper.

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