Inquire about purchasing the book | Table of Contents | Annotated Bibliography | Class on Nature of Mind
These are excerpts and elaborations from my book "The Nature of Consciousness"
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Gravity and
Entropy Dutch physicist Erik
Verlinde("On the Origin of Gravity
and the Laws of Newton", 2010) contends that
gravity is just an illusion, or, better, a mere side-effect of the second law
of Thermodynamics. That law says that Nature tends to maximize disorder, i.e.
that entropy tends to increase. Gravity is an "entropic" force in the
sense that it is ultimately the manifestation of differences in entropy. The US physicist Ted
Jacobsonhad already proved that
Einstein's equations of General Relativity can be formulated in terms of
statistical properties ("Thermodynamics of Spacetime: The Einstein
Equation of State", 1995). The Israeli physicists Ram Brusteinand Merav Hadad("The Einstein equations
for generalized theories of gravity", 2010) generalized Jacobson's theory
to a wider class of gravitational theories (of which Einstein's General
Relativity is just a particular case). The US physicist Sean
Carrollargues that understanding the
universe depends on first understanding entropy. Back to the beginning of the chapter "The New Physics" | Back to the index of all chapters |
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