Does the Whole Shebang Emerge From Entropy? 5

Posted by pat on January 11, 2010

Lately I’ve seen a several papers describing how one fundamental way of measuring the universe or another is actually emergent from a different way of looking at things.  There are those that claim time does not exist in any fundamental way, we are just looking at things wrong. So what is fundamental?

Entropy.

Understand entropy and gravity emerges.  Understand it in a moving frame and General Relativity emerges.  The idea is published on arxiv (On the Origin of Gravity and the Laws of Newton, Erik Verlinde) and even made it to Slashdot.  Woit surveys other entropy related ideas.

As a computer scientist there is something appealing in the notion that information is fundamental and that all the laws of nature are derived from the way information works.

Update: There is a long post from Verlinde on Motl’s blog here.  It illuminates some of his ideas and explains their history.  If you can stomach Motl’s bullying read the comments too, there are many.

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  1. Nisheeth Wed, 13 Jan 2010 10:08:30 UTC

    At the risk of sounding like a shill:

    http://arxiv.org/abs/0902.3479

  2. pat Fri, 15 Jan 2010 17:31:58 UTC

    So curiosity killed Schrödinger’s cat but entropy brought it back? You seem to be observing that the laws of observation lead to the formulation of physical laws. The paper sited above is more about taking the laws of entropy and deriving other laws. In any case your paper is an interesting read and thanks for the research in your sited papers, they are also recommended.

  3. [...] in a comment to a previous post here Nisheeth points to his arxiv article (The relativity of theory, Nisheeth) where he describes a [...]

  4. [...] year of Entropy continues with a paper referencing Verlinde but describing gravity and dark energy as effects of entanglement entropy. Read it on [...]

  5. [...] and Lubos agree on something and that is that Verlinde is on the wrong track, maybe even a crackpot.  But neither seem to have torn apart the math with a [...]

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