Erik Verlinde: Gravity Doesn't Exist | Big Think

Gravity Doesn't Exist??

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ERIK VERLINDE:

Erik Verlinde is a theoretical physicist and string theorist and the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of Amsterdam. The "Verlinde formula," which relates to conformal field theory and topological field theory, is named after him. In a paper called "On the Origin of Gravity and the Laws of Newton," published in January, 2010, Verlinde introduced a new approach to the idea of gravity, positing that it is not a fundamental force but an "emergent phenomenon."

Verlinde's idea that gravity doesn't exist was featured in Big Think's "Month of Thinking Dangerously.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Erik Verlinde: Gravity, of course, is something that have, well, many people have already thought about. It’s something that we see every day and it’s not like it’s not existent in our ordinary life. But what I mean by that it’s an illusion is that one would eventually like to know where it comes from, an explanation. Up to now we have, well, descriptions, I mean, Newton, of course, is the one famous for first writing down a theory of gravity and he described why apples fall and why the moon goes around the earth using the same basic equation for gravity, but he described it. He had to assume that gravity was there and then had to write down a law that described that when two masses are a certain distance, how they attract each other.

But he was also not very happy with the fact that we should just, well, assume that these things, these objects, attract each other and without even anything in between. So if there are two masses and empty space, there’s no, nothing that really happens between them, but still, they’re attracting each other. And he thought that was kind of mysterious and that it was something he would have liked to explain in a better way.

So later came Einstein and Einstein, with his theory of relativity, eventually realized that also gravity has to be described in a different way. And it took him quite some years, but eventually he wrote down a theory where he thought about space and time together and then his explanation of what gravity would be is that there’s masses which curve space, and time. And then motion of planets and of the earth around the moon, or the moon around the earth is then described by thinking about moving in this curved space-time and how then objects are, well, making their orbits. And the reason they go around then in circles is that space and time itself is curved, in the sense that things don’t move in straight lines anymore, they go around. So that was his explanation, but he had to write an equation for it, which again, assumed that gravity was there because he basically wrote down matter curves space-time.

So in a certain way that’s still a description or what, I should say is, well, one would like to understand again why this description sort of, well, how you can understand it from a more basic point of view. So what I’ve done in my paper is try to start from a, well, from a point of view where you don't assume gravity to be there, they would like to explain it by seeing how you can derive it from a more microscopic set of equations where gravity itself is not assumed, but then just follows from a certain logical reasoning.

Question: How should we think about the forces that exist to create the illusion of gravity?

Erik Verlinde: If you think about particles, very tiny particles, and it turns out that things like positions and velocities are not very precisely defined, you have to take into account the fact that there’s an uncertainty in when we look at something, we may influence the measurement, but I mean, also just, there’s a fundamental limit on how precise you can understand the position or the velocity of a particle. They cannot be all, not both described infinitely precise.

So taking gravity into account then gives us a bit of a problem because then we have to talk about space-time and then these quantum certainties gives us another way of looking at space-time at the short distances. So this led to problems... and string theory is another way of also looking at gravity and quantum mechanics, which I’ve been working on quite a bit. So people have studied the problem of quantum mechanics in gravity from various perspectives—from string theory, but also was thinking, for instance, about black holes, what happens with black holes.

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