One of the most exciting ideas in modern physics is that gravity is not a traditional force, like electromagnetic or nuclear forces. Instead, it is an emergent phenomenon that merely looks like a traditional force.
This approach has been championed by Erik Verlinde at the University of Amsterdam who put forward the idea in 2010. He suggested that gravity is merely a manifestation of entropy in the Universe, which always increases according to the second law of thermodynamics. This causes matter distribute itself in a way that maximises entropy. And the effect of this redistribution looks like a force which we call gravity.
Much of the excitement over Verlinde's idea is that it provides a way to reconcile the contradictions between gravity, which works on a large scale, and quantum mechanics, which works on a tiny scale.
The key idea is that gravity is essentially a statistical effect. As long as each particle is influenced by a statistically large number of other particles, gravity emerges. That's why it's a large-scale phenomenon.
But today, Archil Kobakhidze at The University of Melbourne in Australia points to a serious problem with this approach. He naturally asks how gravity can influence quantum particles.
To read the rest of the article, click here."There are different kinds of theories of emergent gravity. This experiment does not preclude my emergent tetrad model from the Higgs-Goldstone vacuum condensate published in Vol 14 of the Journal of Cosmology, April 2011." - Jack Sarfatti