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Posted on 07/13/2010 3:35:33 PM PDT by Mr. Mojo
By It’s hard to imagine a more fundamental and ubiquitous aspect of life on the Earth than gravity, from the moment you first took a step and fell on your diapered bottom to the slow terminal sagging of flesh and dreams.
But what if it’s all an illusion, a sort of cosmic frill, or a side effect of something else going on at deeper levels of reality?
So says Erik Verlinde, 48, a respected string theorist and professor of physics at the University of Amsterdam, whose contention that gravity is indeed an illusion has caused a continuing ruckus among physicists, or at least among those who profess to understand it. Reversing the logic of 300 years of science, he argued in a recent paper, titled “On the Origin of Gravity and the Laws of Newton,” that gravity is a consequence of the venerable laws of thermodynamics, which describe the behavior of heat and gases.
“For me gravity doesn’t exist,” said Dr. Verlinde, who was recently in the United States to explain himself. Not that he can’t fall down, but Dr. Verlinde is among a number of physicists who say that science has been looking at gravity the wrong way and that there is something more basic, from which gravity “emerges,” the way stock markets emerge from the collective behavior of individual investors or that elasticity emerges from the mechanics of atoms.
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.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
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String theory, as you noted, is BS of the worst sort. One of the basic ideas is to give the evolosers an infinity of universes to work with since they know the odds against evoloserism with just the one universe we see around us.
And that is exactly it.
Yet, what has always given string, or M-Theory it´s strong appeal is that it mathematically unifies relativity and quantum theory as no other framework ever has. This alone is what holds so many in it´s...charm.
Gravity is an illusion, and M-Theory is truth.
Pull the other 11 ones.
A few years ago weren't the same people saying gravity was a strong force rather than a weak force? Helped make the rest of the theories work...
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