Is gravity an illusion?

[bleachededen]

I don't understand this guy's ideas, and neither do most scientists, but SOMEONE has to.

nytimes.com/2010/07/13/science/13gravit ... terstitial

Would anyone like to clarify this mess for me so I can understand what the hell this crazy dude is talking about? Cause I'm still noticing and experiencing gravity, so as far as I'm concerned, it's no freaking illusion.

[Robert Tulip]

I don't understand this guy's ideas, and neither do most scientists, but SOMEONE has to.

nytimes.com/2010/07/13/science/13gravit ... terstitial

Would anyone like to clarify this mess for me so I can understand what the hell this crazy dude is talking about? Cause I'm still noticing and experiencing gravity, so as far as I'm concerned, it's no freaking illusion.

As it happens, I recently had occasion to discuss the closely related topic "Is Gravity a Force?" It turns out that in General Relativity, which provides the mainstream scientific understanding of the nature of the universe, gravity is not a force, but is rather something like the warping of spacetime by mass. As you can see in the thread linked below, this is the subject of broad confusion including among well informed scientists.

See http://www.bautforum.com/showthread.php ... ty-a-force

[bleachededen]

Still incredibly unhelpful. Thanks, though!

[stahrwe]

I suspect, based on the below quote from the paper that the author is not representing that he understands it.

We identified a cause, a mechanism, for gravity. It is driven by differences in entropy, in whatever way defined, and a consequence of the statistical averaged random dynamics at the microscopic level. The reason why gravity has to keep track of energies as well as entropy differences is now clear. It has to, because this is what causes motion!

The presented arguments have admittedly been rather heuristic. One can not expect otherwise, given the fact that we are entering an unknown territory in which space does not exist to begin with. The profound nature of these questions in our view justifies the heuristic level of reasoning. The assumptions we made have been natural: they fit with existing ideas and are supported by several pieces of evidence. In the following we gather more supporting evidence from string theory, the AdS/CFT correspondence, and black hole physics.

On the Origin of Gravity and the Laws of Newton by Erik Verlinde
pages 22-23

the concluding sentence of the first paragraph is a good example and made me chuckle.

I suggest that a good book to get a feel for the type of theoretical discussion here is Fire in the Equations by Kitty Fergussen

[jhorton]

I saw a program on the Discovery Channel, or was it National Geographic, where it sounded like they were saying that it is the displacement of space created by a large celestial body, like the earth, that creates a "dent" in space, resulting on space "pushing" objects towards the earth, rather than gravity "pulling" on things. I only caught about fifteen minutes of the program but it sounded kind of interesting. I probably just massacred what they were trying to say, but that's what I took away.