Posted by pat
on March 23, 2010
Woit and Motl 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 critical eye and, well let’s just say they have strong pre-existing opinions about the proper way to think. They are both smart but extreme enough that I sometimes question their opinions only because they hold them. What’s an amateur to do to get a balanced analysis?
Enter Sabine Hossenfelder or Bee as she is known to her blog readers. She has recently spent time examining Verlinde’s paper producing a blog post and arXiv paper. She offers some thoughtful criticism and asks the question, “so what?” Some sort of equivalence between entropy and gravity is only useful if it can be used as a bridge to apply gravity to the quantum world. And she finds that part still lacking.
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.