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dark force head

Dutch string theorist Dr. Erik Verlinde insists on saying gravity doesn't be. The skillful professor clearly does non believe that if he stops holding onto his briefcase, information technology will practise anything other than fall. But he definitely believes nosotros're thinking of it all wrong. And if it turns out he'due south right, it could modify the way we call back about the big-calibration structure of the universe, and make a scientific shot over the bow at the idea of dark thing. Physicists accept taken upward the challenge, and the start results are in — and they support Verlinde's ideas.

Gravity, Verlinde contends, is just an emergent phenomenon stemming from entropy, and we don't need dark affair to explain the way we see galaxies behave. In his theory, when particles get closer under the influence of gravity, they're actually merely relieving entropic strain: falling into a lower-energy land. Because gravity operates at slap-up distances, Verlinde believes that this change in our expectations of gravity could account for the divergence between the gravitational beliefs we await galaxies to exhibit, and what we run into. Information technology could remove the "place" that the idea of nighttime matter is "holding."

This new explanation builds on Verlinde'south 2010 work, wherein he made a lot of grand statements in a long, proof-style paper that reads with the scenic, perfect conviction only a career mathematician can muster.

It is well known that Newton was criticized by his contemporaries, peculiarly by Hooke, that his law of gravity acts at a distance and has no direct mechanical cause like the elastic force. Ironically, this is precisely the reason why Hooke's elastic force is present not seen as fundamental, while Newton's gravitational strength has maintained that status for more than 3 centuries. What Newton did not know, and certainly Hooke didn't, is that the universe is holographic. Holography is as well an hypothesis, of course, and may appear merely every bit absurd equally an activity at a altitude.

One of the main points of this paper is that the holographic hypothesis provides a natural mechanism for gravity to emerge. Information technology allows direct "contact" interactions between degrees of freedom associated with one material body and another, since all bodies inside a book tin be mapped on the same holographic screen. Once this is done, the mechanisms for Newton'southward gravity and Hooke'south elasticity are surprisingly like. 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 concrete abiding that is the quantum of action, central in quantum mechanics." Changing this parameter apparently helps to resolve the difference in how fast galaxies should be moving through space relative to the mass they have. At the end, Verlinde put forth a master equation that could exist used to examination his ideas. This year, Dr. Margo Brouwer put his predictions to the test by looking at 33,000 galaxies, and found that using Verlinde'due south equations, our mathematical predictions of a sudden line up with the data, and the galaxies move at the same speed nosotros look them to.

Stephan's Quintet

Stephan'south Quintet: These iv galaxies were imaged in 2009 using the WFC3. This compact grouping of galaxies is distorted because of their gravitational furnishings on each other.

Verlinde's ideas plough over more than just the labels nosotros use to talk about gravity. One of the biggest questions in physics is why the force of gravity that we run into around a galaxy is and then much stronger than what Einstein'southward general theory of relativity would predict, even at not bad distances. To date, nosotros've deemed for this past invoking dark matter and nighttime energy, which together apparently brand upward much of the universe. But the infamous "placeholder" still offends many scientists' sense of reason. If it's so important that information technology alters the fate of galaxies, so ubiquitous that at that place could be seasons of dark matter as the Earth moves with or confronting the galactic current, why can't nosotros run across it or exam for it or otherwise interact with it in any mode? Epicycles accounted for everything we could run into — until suddenly we could run across more, and that explanation was no longer sufficient. At least antimatter has the good manners to light up when it interacts with matter. How many exotic regimes of physics must in that location exist?

Verlinde agrees in his recent work: "[The] fact that 95% of our Universe consists of mysterious forms of free energy or matter gives sufficient motivation to reconsider this bones starting point." Instead, Verlinde believes information technology possible to describe the observed distribution of gravity without resorting to substances like dark matter and dark energy if gravity is considered an emergent miracle arising from entropy — a consequence of thermodynamics, every bit outlined in his 2010 theory.

This is where I start to have problems. Nobody seems to have asked this nevertheless: If gravity is a byproduct of the universe's 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 some other where they make 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 it break annihilation else? Relabeling gravity equally a different kind of omnipresent strength is one thing. If gravity arises from entropy and dark matter isn't necessary to resolve the conflict between Einstein's theories and the distribution we see, then we have a lot of thinking to do.

This isn't a one-shot disproof of dark affair. Earlier in 2016, the JPL made observations of galaxy clusters that tied their concrete structure in iii-space to the density of dark affair around them. Cosmologists related the age and size of the dark matter formations within galaxy clusters to how tightly their resident galaxies were packed. It was the first time a property other than mass had ever been ascribed to night affair, which currently nosotros think must be fabricated of calorie-free, weakly interacting particles something like neutrinos. It could as well provide a window into studying dark energy; if dark free energy and dark matter interact, we could get a sense of how dark energy influences dark affair by studying how it moves. Is this a pivot in the field of physics? Either way, we're starting to make moves along the frustrating path to fully characterizing dark matter — or discarding the theory.

At present read: What is nighttime matter?