![]() ![]() Verlinde is not an obvious candidate to go off the deep end. “Some people have said it can’t be right, others that it’s right and we already knew it - that it’s right and profound, right and trivial,” Andrew Strominger, a string theorist at Harvard said.ĭr. But some of those very same physicists say he has provided a fresh perspective on some of the deepest questions in science, namely why space, time and gravity exist at all - even if he has not yet answered them. Verlinde’s paper, and many are outright skeptical. ![]() Some of the best physicists in the world say they don’t understand Dr. Forget curved space or the spooky attraction at a distance described by Isaac Newton’s equations well enough to let us navigate the rings of Saturn, the force we call gravity is simply a byproduct of nature’s propensity to maximize disorder. So it takes a force to pull hair straight and eliminate nature’s options. It goes something like this: your hair frizzles in the heat and humidity, because there are more ways for your hair to be curled than to be straight, and nature likes options. Verlinde’s argument turns on something you could call the “bad hair day” theory of gravity. Looking at gravity from this angle, they say, could shed light on some of the vexing cosmic issues of the day, like the dark energy, a kind of anti-gravity that seems to be speeding up the expansion of the universe, or the dark matter that is supposedly needed to hold galaxies together.ĭr. ![]()
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