Could both gravity and the Big Bang be an illusion? In January 2010, Erik Verlinde, professor ofTheoretical Physics and world-renowned string theorist, caused a worldwide stir with the publication of On the Origin of Gravity and the Laws of Newton,
in which he challenged commonly held perceptions on gravity, going so
far as to state ‘for me gravity doesn’t exist’. If he is proved correct,
the consequences for our understanding of the universe and its origins
in a Big Bang will be far-reaching.
"Everyone who is working on theoretical physics is trying to improve on Einstein," says Robbert Dijkgraaf, UvA University Professor and current director of the Institute for Advanced Study in
Princeton (where scientists including Turing, Oppenheimer and Einstein
have worked) In my opinion, Erik Verlinde has found an important key for
the next step forward."
Verlinde, who received the Spinoza prize (the
Dutch Nobel Prize) from the Netherlands Organisation for Science, is
famous for developing this new theory, or idea, on gravity in which he
says that gravity is an illusion. "Gravity is not an illusion in the
sense that we know that things fall," says Verline." Most people,
certainly in physics, think we can describe gravity perfectly adequately
using Einstein’s General Relativity.
But it now seems that we can also start from a microscopic formulation
where there is no gravity to begin with, but you can derive it. This is
called ‘emergence’"
"We have other phenomena in Physics like this," Verlinde continued.
"Take a concept like ‘temperature’, for instance. We experience it every
day. We can feel temperature. But, if you really think about the
microscopic molecules, there’s no notion of temperature there. It’s
something that has to do with the property of all molecules together;
it’s like the average energy per molecule."
To Verlinde, gravity is similar. It’s something that only appears
when you put many things together at a microscopic scale and then you
suddenly see that certain equations arise. "As scientists," he observes,
"we first want to understand nature and our universe. In doing so, we
have observed things that are deeply puzzling, such as phenomena related
to dark matter. We see things happening that we don’t understand. There
must be more matter out there that we don’t see. There’s also something
called ‘dark energy’. And then there’s the whole puzzle of the
beginning of the universe. We now have what is called the ‘Big Bang’
theory.
Verline belives his ideas will shed new light on the concept of ‘dark
matter’ and ‘dark energy’ and why they’re important in relation to
gravity.
"We think we understand gravity in most situations," he says "but
when we look at galaxies and, on much larger scales, at galaxy clusters,
we see things happening that we don’t understand using our familiar
equations, like Newton’s equation of gravity or even Einstein’s gravity.
So we have to assume there’s this mysterious form of matter, which we
call dark matter, which we cannot see. Now dark energy is even weirder,
in the sense that we don’t even know what it consists of. It’s something
we can put in our equations to make things work, but there’s really a
big puzzle to be solved in terms of why it’s there and what it’s made
of. At present, we have not really found the right equations to describe
it. There’s clearly progress to be made in terms of finding a bettertheory of gravity, and understanding what’s happening in our universe."
For example, the Big Bang theory is
the idea that at a particular moment things suddenly started exploding
and growing, and that our universe got bigger, which Verlinde finds
illogical to think it came from this one moment.
"It’s illogical to think there was nothing and then it exploded. We
use concepts like time and space," he adds, "but we don’t really
understand what this means microscopically. That might change. The Big
Bang has to do with our understanding of what time should be, and I
think we will have a much better understanding of this in the future. I
think we will figure out that what we thought was the Big Bang was
actually a different kind of event. Or maybe that we should not think
that the universe really began at a particular moment and that there’s
another way to describe that."
Verlinde believes that the information we have today and the
equations we now use only describe a very small part of what is actually
going on. "If you think that something grows, like our universe, than
something else must become smaller," he observes."I think there’s
something we haven’t found yet and this will help us discover the
origins of our universe. In short, the universe originated from
something, not from nothing. There was something there and we have to
find the equations. It has something to do with dark energy and how that
is related to dark matter. If we understand the equations for those
components of our universe, I think we’ll also have a better
understanding of how the universe began. I think it’s all about the
interplay between these different forms of energy and matter.
The Big Bang theory works well in the sense that it gives us some
understanding of how particular elements in our universe came about and
there are other things that we can observe, like the radiation that came
from the Big Bang. But the whole idea of an expanding universe that
started with a big explosion will change. "You need to think about the
equations in a bigger setting," Verlinde observes. "You need to describe
more than just the matter particles. You need to know more about what
space/time is. All these things have to come together in order to be
able to explain the Big Bang."
Quantum mechanics took approximately 26 years to develop, Verlinde
concludes. "We’ve had string theory for 40 years and nothing yet has
come out of that which can be directly tested with observations or
experiments. I think my idea has a greater chance of being tested with
observations, which is an exciting thing. I think it will take no more
than 10 or 15 years."
The end result be belives will lead to a paradigm shift in how people think that the universe was created.
Source: The Daily Galaxy via University of Amsterdam and Erik Verlinde
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