Is Gravity an Illusion?
by ilene - July 14th, 2010 11:37 am
Is Gravity an Illusion?
Courtesy of John Lounsbury writing at Seeking Alpha
Erik Verlinde is a 48 year old professor of physics at the University of Amsterdam. Verlinde is a celebrated expert in string theory, that esoteric field of research attempting to move the description of the universe beyond Einstein. Dennis Overbye has a very interesting article today about Verlinde in The New York Times.
It is not string theory that has attracted new attention to Verlinde. In fact, what has some of the physics world talking (and some yawning) involves little rigorous mathematics. Verlinde has proposed that gravity is not a fundamental force of the universe, as proposed by Newton and Einstein. He proposes that it is secondary, an illusion if you will, resulting from observations of the effects of laws of thermodynamics. He sees gravity as a symptom produced by entropy, the form that energy takes as a result of irreversible (ie, naturally occurring) processes which make that energy unavailable to do work. Many are most familiar with entropy as a measure of disorder.
Verlinde sees entropy as a fundamental parameter and gravity as a dependent variable. Newton and Einstein saw gravity as a fundamental force of the universe whereby any two objects undergo mutual attraction which increases as the product of their masses and decreases as the square of the distance that separates them. Verlinde’s suggestions seem to be centered on the idea that our perception of gravity is a prisoner of our view of space. The Overbye article goes into a number of interesting thought processes relating our traditional physics in three dimensional space to holograms which reduce multidimensional information to two dimensional space without any losses. One of the ideas was written as follows:
Those exploding black holes (at least in theory — none has ever been observed) lit up a new strangeness of nature. Black holes, in effect, are holograms — like the 3-D images you see on bank cards. All the information about what has been lost inside them is encoded on their surfaces. Physicists have been wondering ever since how this “holographic principle” — that we are all maybe just shadows on a distant wall — applies to the universe and where it came from.
Verlinde’s ideas have critics who say he is lacking in mathematical rigor. He does sound more like a science philosopher than a practicing theoretical physicist. Some might say he should try…
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The Futility Economy
by ilene - January 5th, 2010 11:24 am
The Futility Economy
It’s the first business day of the new year and oil is trading above $80 a barrel, which means the price has re-entered the danger zone where it can crush industrial economies. This is a central element of the predicament we find ourselves in. The US economy is essentially a Happy Motoring economy. During the whole nervous period since the collapse of Lehman Brothers, American gasoline consumption hardly went down at all, though so many other activities collapsed, from house-building to trucking. Yesterday, The Seattle Times published a story with the idiotic headline: Oil Touches $80 on US Economy, Demand Optimism. Apparently, they think high oil prices are "a good sign."
How much can a nation not get it? Would $100 oil ignite a new orgy of "consumer" spending and another round of investment in commercial real estate? Welcome to the Futility Economy. This is the economy where Nature and its material companion, Reality, punish us for our stupidity and fecklessness. This is the economy that will tear the United States apart, after it bankrupts us at every level, and mercilessly drives the population down by one-third through starvation, homelessness, violence, disease, and sheer political cruelty.
Whatever you thought our economy was the past thirty years — whatever model of it you have in your head — that is definitely not what we are going back to. Like one of Dickens’s Yuletide ghosts, Reality is leading us by the hand into new circumstances. We resist like crazy. We throw our hands over our eyes. We don’t want to look. We want to return to the comfort of our dreary routines — living in places that aren’t worth caring about, weaving endlessly in freeway traffic, drawing a paycheck at the air-conditioned cubicle, inhaling Buffalo wings by the platterful, with periodic side-trips to the state-chartered casino where there’s always a chance of scoring a lifetime’s income on one lucky bet. And at the end of the day, you can retire with a simulated prostitute on your laptop screen! And not even have to fork over a dime — except perhaps for the Internet connection fee.
Reality is taking us out of that familiar, if sordid, realm, whether we like it or not. Our destination is an
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW.