The thermodynamic description of gravity has a history that goes back at least to research on
black hole thermodynamics by
Bekenstein and
Hawking in the mid-1970s. These studies suggest a deep connection between
gravity and thermodynamics, which describes the behavior of heat. In 1995,
Jacobson demonstrated that the
Einstein field equations describing relativistic gravitation can be derived by combining general thermodynamic considerations with the
equivalence principle.
[1] Subsequently, other physicists, most notably
Thanu Padmanabhan, began to explore links between gravity and
entropy.
[2][3]
Erik Verlinde's theory
In 2009,
Erik Verlinde proposed a conceptual model that describes gravity as an entropic force.
[4] He argues (similar to Jacobson's result) that gravity is a consequence of the "information associated with the positions of material bodies".
[5] This model combines the thermodynamic approach to gravity with
Gerard 't Hooft's
holographic principle. It implies that gravity is not a
fundamental interaction, but an
emergent phenomenon which arises from the statistical behavior of microscopic
degrees of freedom encoded on a holographic screen. The paper drew a variety of responses from the scientific community.
Andrew Strominger, a string theorist at Harvard said "Some people have said it can't be right, others that it's right and we already knew it – that it’s right and profound, right and trivial."
[6]
In July 2011, Verlinde presented the further development of his ideas in a contribution to the Strings 2011 conference, including an explanation for the origin of dark matter.
[7]
Verlinde's article also attracted a large amount of media exposure,
[8][9] and led to immediate follow-up work in cosmology,
[10][11] the
dark energy hypothesis,
[12] cosmological acceleration,
[13][14] cosmological inflation,
[15] and
loop quantum gravity.
[16] Also, a specific microscopic model has been proposed that indeed leads to entropic gravity emerging at large scales.
[17] Entropic gravity can emerge from quantum entanglement of local Rindler horizons.
[18]