The Dutch theoretical physicist Erik Verlinde is no stranger to big ideas. His 2009 hypothesis about gravity earned him comparisons to Einstein for its complete rethinking of what gravity could be. Verlinde proposed that gravity was not a fundamental force of nature but rather emerged out of the interactions of information that fills the universe. He also didn’t think there was such a thing as “dark matter”—a useful construct which is supposedly taking up 27% of the known universe (but is yet to be observed). Now, in a new interview, Verlinde reveals he is taking steps towards conceptualizing his groundbreaking ideas in a full-fledged theory.
As reported by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), Verlinde understands why many had trouble accepting his original proposal. After all, the previous leading explanations of gravity have been by Newton, who saw it as an invisible pulling force, and Einstein, who conceived of it as a curvature of space-time by mass and energy.
In Verlinde’s view, based on string theory, quantum information theory and the physics of black holes, gravity is an “entropic” force that comes into existence as a result of “information associated with the positions of material bodies,” as he wrote in his 2011 paper. What drives gravity is the quantum entanglement of tiny bits of spacetime information.