Up or Down? Gravity Might Be Harder to Understand than You Thought

[David]

We know the world is ever-changing and, honestly, we like it that way.  We like the innovation and creativity that comes from human dreams and observations of the world around us.  We are definitely fans of such leaps forward as indoor plumbing and air conditioning. But, what about changing something that seems like a foundational building block for our world?  Something we refer to as “not just a good idea, but a law”? Yes, we’re talking about gravity. Dutch theoretical physicist Erik Verlinde has a hypothesis that completely rethinks what gravity could be.  It doesn’t get rid of it or ignore its existence, but it explains it in different terms than Newton and Einstein.  His theory, still being studied and fleshed out, is that gravity is an “entropic force that comes into existence as a result of information associated with the positions of material bodies...what drives gravity is the quantum entanglement of tiny bits of spacetime information.”  If you find that hard to understand, that’s okay. Verlinde says new ideas in theoretical physics takes time.