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dark force head

Dutch string theorist Dr. Erik Verlinde insists on maxim gravity doesn't be. The good professor clearly does not believe that if he stops holding onto his briefcase, information technology will practise anything other than fall. But he definitely believes we're thinking of it all incorrect. And if information technology turns out he'due south right, it could change the mode we recall well-nigh the big-scale structure of the universe, and make a scientific shot over the bow at the idea of dark matter. Physicists accept taken up the challenge, and the get-go results are in — and they back up Verlinde'due south ideas.

Gravity, Verlinde contends, is just an emergent phenomenon stemming from entropy, and we don't need dark affair to explicate the mode we see galaxies conduct. In his theory, when particles go closer under the influence of gravity, they're actually just relieving entropic strain: falling into a lower-free energy state. Because gravity operates at bang-up distances, Verlinde believes that this change in our expectations of gravity could account for the difference between the gravitational behavior nosotros expect galaxies to exhibit, and what we encounter. It could remove the "place" that the idea of night matter is "holding."

This new caption builds on Verlinde's 2022 work, wherein he made a lot of grand statements in a long, proof-manner paper that reads with the breathtaking, perfect confidence only a career mathematician tin can muster.

It is well known that Newton was criticized by his contemporaries, especially by Hooke, that his law of gravity acts at a altitude and has no direct mechanical cause like the elastic force. Ironically, this is precisely the reason why Hooke's elastic force is nowadays non seen as fundamental, while Newton's gravitational force has maintained that status for more than than three centuries. What Newton did not know, and certainly Hooke didn't, is that the universe is holographic. Holography is also an hypothesis, of course, and may announced only as absurd as an action at a distance.

1 of the primary points of this paper is that the holographic hypothesis provides a natural machinery for gravity to emerge. It allows straight "contact" interactions betwixt degrees of freedom associated with one material body and another, since all bodies inside a volume tin can be mapped on the aforementioned holographic screen. Once this is washed, the mechanisms for Newton's gravity and Hooke'south elasticity are surprisingly similar. We suspect that neither of these rivals would have been happy with this conclusion.

To support his theory, he went on to experimentally vary the value of ħ: the Planck constant, pronounced h-bar, which Wikipedia defines as "a physical abiding that is the breakthrough of action, central in breakthrough mechanics." Changing this parameter apparently helps to resolve the divergence in how fast galaxies should exist moving through infinite relative to the mass they accept. At the end, Verlinde put forth a master equation that could be used to examination his ideas. This year, Dr. Margo Brouwer put his predictions to the test by looking at 33,000 galaxies, and institute that using Verlinde'south equations, our mathematical predictions suddenly line upward with the data, and the galaxies move at the aforementioned speed nosotros expect them to.

Stephan's Quintet

Stephan's Quintet: These 4 galaxies were imaged in 2009 using the WFC3. This meaty group of galaxies is distorted considering of their gravitational effects on each other.

Verlinde's ideas turn over more than just the labels we apply to talk about gravity. One of the biggest questions in physics is why the force of gravity that we run across around a galaxy is and then much stronger than what Einstein'due south general theory of relativity would predict, fifty-fifty at groovy distances. To date, we've deemed for this by invoking dark matter and night energy, which together patently make up much of the universe. But the infamous "placeholder" withal offends many scientists' sense of reason. If information technology's then important that it alters the fate of galaxies, so ubiquitous that there could be seasons of dark affair as the Earth moves with or against the galactic current, why tin't we see it or exam for it or otherwise interact with information technology in any way? Epicycles accounted for everything nosotros could meet — until of a sudden we could see more, and that explanation was no longer sufficient. At to the lowest degree antimatter has the good manners to lite upwards when it interacts with matter. How many exotic regimes of physics must there be?

Verlinde agrees in his recent work: "[The] fact that 95% of our Universe consists of mysterious forms of energy or matter gives sufficient motivation to reconsider this basic starting betoken." Instead, Verlinde believes it possible to describe the observed distribution of gravity without resorting to substances like dark affair and dark energy if gravity is considered an emergent phenomenon arising from entropy — a issue of thermodynamics, as outlined in his 2022 theory.

This is where I first to have problems. Nobody seems to have asked this yet: If gravity is a byproduct of the universe'southward tendency to maximize disorder, then why does it seem to pull things together into a more ordered state? Is this related to the way polar and non-polar liquids exclude one another where they brand contact? How does entropic gravity work in light of the long-term tendencies of clumps of matter in our universe? What else depends on the Planck abiding, and does changing information technology break anything else? Relabeling gravity as a different kind of omnipresent strength is i thing. If gravity arises from entropy and dark matter isn't necessary to resolve the conflict between Einstein'south theories and the distribution we see, and then we accept a lot of thinking to do.

This isn't a i-shot disproof of dark matter. Earlier in 2022, the JPL made observations of galaxy clusters that tied their physical structure in 3-space to the density of nighttime thing around them. Cosmologists related the age and size of the night matter formations within galaxy clusters to how tightly their resident galaxies were packed. It was the first time a property other than mass had always been ascribed to dark thing, which currently we retrieve must exist made of calorie-free, weakly interacting particles something like neutrinos. It could as well provide a window into studying dark energy; if night energy and dark matter interact, we could go a sense of how dark free energy influences night affair by studying how it moves. Is this a pivot in the field of physics? Either way, we're starting to brand moves along the frustrating path to fully characterizing dark matter — or discarding the theory.

Now read: What is dark matter?