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.
The above is only a short excerpt of a NY times article
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/13/science/13gravity.html
Dr. Verlinde's website
http://staff.science.uva.nl/~erikv/
Our understanding of a thing shapes the form and function of that thing. This is true whether the thing is animal, mineral, sub-atomic, plant, or any of the countlessly infinite forms present in existence.
Science, as it is strictly defined scholastically, fails to grasp this on one hand and then uses this on the other hand to restrict our ability to perceive and fully comprehend life in its totality. That's why i like science fiction. The following is not science fiction. It is the attempt by a scientist to use the tools of science to understand the truth about existence. I wish him luck. I invite you to check him out. Many scifi story ideas can be generated from his effort.
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