Abstract
Starting from first principles and general assumptions we present a heuristic argument that shows that Newton’s law of gravitation naturally arises in a theory in which space emerges through a holographic scenario. Gravity is identified with an entropic force caused by changes in the information associated with the positions of material bodies. A relativistic generalization of the presented arguments directly leads to the Einstein equations. When space is emergent even Newton’s law of inertia needs to be explained. The equivalence principle auggests that it is actually the law of inertia whose origin is entropic.
References
J.D. Bekenstein, Black holes and entropy, Phys. Rev. D 7 (1973) 2333 [SPIRES].
J.M. Bardeen, B. Carter and S.W. Hawking, The Four laws of black hole mechanics, Commun. Math. Phys. 31 (1973) 161 [SPIRES].
S.W. Hawking, Particle Creation by Black Holes, Commun. Math. Phys. 43 (1975) 199 [SPIRES].
P.C.W. Davies, Scalar particle production in Schwarzschild and Rindler metrics, J. Phys. A 8 (1975) 609 [SPIRES].
W.G. Unruh, Notes on black hole evaporation, Phys. Rev. D 14 (1976) 870 [SPIRES].
T. Damour, Surface effects in black hole physics, in Proceedings of the Second Marcel Grossmann Meeting on General Relativity, R. Ruffini ed., North Holland, (1982).
T. Jacobson, Thermodynamics of space-time: The Einstein equation of state, Phys. Rev. Lett. 75 (1995) 1260 [gr-qc/9504004] [SPIRES].
G. ’t Hooft, Dimensional reduction in quantum gravity, gr-qc/9310026 [SPIRES].
L. Susskind, The World as a hologram, J. Math. Phys. 36 (1995) 6377 [hep-th/9409089] [SPIRES].
J.M. Maldacena, The large-N limit of superconformal field theories and supergravity, Int. J. Theor. Phys. 38 (1999) 1113 [Adv. Theor. Math. Phys. 2 (1998) 231] [hep-th/9711200] [SPIRES].
R.M. Wald, General Relativity, The University of Chicago Press, (1984).
R.M. Wald, Black hole entropy is the Noether charge, Phys. Rev. D 48 (1993) 3427 [gr-qc/9307038] [SPIRES].
L. Susskind, The anthropic landscape of string theory, hep-th/0302219 [SPIRES].
T. Padmanabhan, Thermodynamical Aspects of Gravity: New insights, Rept. Prog. Phys. 73 (2010) 046901 [arXiv:0911.5004] [SPIRES].
J.D. Bekenstein, A Universal Upper Bound on the Entropy to Energy Ratio for Bounded Systems, Phys. Rev. D 23 (1981) 287 [SPIRES].
E.P. Verlinde, to appear.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
ArXiv ePrint: 1001.0785
Rights and permissions
Open Access This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0), which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
About this article
Cite this article
Verlinde, E. On the origin of gravity and the laws of Newton. J. High Energ. Phys. 2011, 29 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP04(2011)029
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP04(2011)029
Keywords
- Gauge-gravity correspondence
- Models of Quantum Gravity