Dutch theoretical physicist and string theorist Prof. Erik Verlinde has just published a new research paper, "Emergent Gravity and the Dark Universe," at arXiv.org in which he restates his case first made in 2010 that gravity is not a fundamental force but is, instead, an entropic force that arises from a physical system's tendency to increase its entropy.

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Instead of calling this new theory of gravity "entropic gravity" as he did in his 2011 paper titled "On the Origin of Gravity and the Laws of Newton," Prof. Verlinde now refers to this theory as "Emergent Gravity." 

Emergent gravity also dismisses the existence of dark matter as a binding universal force.

Prof. Verlinde says emergent gravity predicts the exact same deviation of motions usually explained by inserting dark matter in the theory.

With emergent gravity, there is no need to add a mysterious dark matter particle to the theory. Prof. Verlinde's paper on ArXiv shows how his theory of gravity accurately predicts the velocities by which the stars rotate around the center of the Milky Way, as well as the motion of stars inside other galaxies.

"We have evidence that this new view of gravity actually agrees with the observations," said Prof. Verlinde.

"At large scales, it seems, gravity just doesn't behave the way Einstein's theory predicts."

The paper recognizes the fact that outer regions of galaxies, like our Milky Way, rotate much faster around the center than can be accounted for by the quantity of ordinary matter like stars, planets  and interstellar gasses.

Something else has to produce the required amount of gravitational force, and so dark matter entered the scene.

Because of this, dark matter seems to dominate our universe: more than 80% of all matter must have a dark nature.  Hitherto, the alleged dark matter particles have never been observed, despite many efforts to detect them.

Extending his previous work and work done by others, Prof. Verlinde now shows that emergent gravity can explain the curious behavior of stars in galaxies without adding the puzzling dark matter.

Prof. Verlinde's emergent gravity theory postulates that gravity isn't a fundamental force of nature, but an emergent phenomenon.

In the same way that temperature arises from the movement of microscopic particles, gravity emerges from the changes of fundamental bits of information, stored in the very structure of spacetime.

TagsGravity, emergent gravity, entropic gravity, Prof. Erik Verlinde, dark matter