Gravity non-existant?

[Alondro]

The gravity is a lie

*squees!*  I thought of this idea myself a few years ago!  It figures in perfectly with my other conceptualizations that time dilation due to gravity is also an illusion and instead related to a photon's ability to convey information at a given speed (ie, as an object approaches an event horizon, it becomes harder for light and electromagnetic radiation to escape the curvature or whatever it is, thus the photons and energy waves conveying information on the direction and speed of the object take longer and longer to make it to the observer.  So we end up seeing an object that 'appears' to redshift and slow down when in fact it has already squished into the event horizon at expected velocity.)

This all is fitting nicely with the latest string theory calculations, which among other things remove the requirement for a singularity in a black hole, replacing it with a ball of densly packed strings which can retain the information of what fell in, plus hold onto calculable physics laws, have a predicted radius exactly matching the classically calculated border of the event horizon for a black hole of a given mass, AND lead to Hawking radiation, thus fulfilling that prediction.

It also matches up with what may be the truth behind quantum entanglement, that the entangled 'particle pairs' are in fact working as a single waveform that simply stretches through the universe as the apparent particles are separation, somehow making use of a universal 'hidden variable'; a type of universal constant which seems to indicate that the entire universe might on some level be acting as a single quantum unit, which might make sense in the face of inflationary theory's implication that the universe was at one point akin to a single particle/waveform in structure.

Gravity itself would be a function of the cosmological constant, which is bound to entropy.  It also seems that this would figure nicely with the anti-gravity effect of dark energy, which under this idea would itself also be an artifactual effect of entropy distribution rather than an additional force.

Now if I could only understand all those mind-numbing equations. 

[superluser]

spooky attraction at a distance described by Isaac Newton's equations

Spooky-action-at-a-distance, or quantum entanglement, was not described by Newton.

That pretty much sums up the article.  Read the actual paper instead, it may be good.  If the paper is claiming that gravity is an artefact of entropy, that may not really be anything new, since everything in the universe comes back to entropy, eventually.  Why does a magnet attract magnetic objects?  Because entropy demands that they fall into the lowest energy state.  Swap magnetism for gravity, and we knew this already.  See also: general relativity, which says that force is force, whether gravity or electromagnetism.

If you want to see something a little more rigorous and a little more mind-blowing, see how this grabs you.

When we use the term mass in physics, there are really two meanings.  One is gravitational mass, which is the quantity that affects how strongly two objects will attract each other, like what you see in Newton's equation for universal gravitation, F = G*m_1*m_2/(r**2) .  The other is inertial mass, which affects how much force it takes to move an object, like in Newton's second law of motion, F = m*a .  Thus, you should be able to write the equation thus: m*a = G*m*m_someotherobject/(r**2) .  Here's the freaky part.  There's no good reason why the m in this last equation should be the same.  It just happens to be that we've never detected any discrepancy, and we know of no good reason for that equivalence to be wrong.

Until now.  Imagine a stone too heavy to lift that would roll away at the lightest breeze or a balloon floating in midair that refused to budge no matter how hard you pushed it.  Imagine...well, imagine Juggernaut.  If inertial mass does not equal gravitational mass, those could be the consequences (it's highly unlikely for those to be the real consequences, but it's more impressive than the miniscule difference that would really occur).

[Tapewolf]

Until now.  Imagine a stone too heavy to lift that would roll away at the lightest breeze or a balloon floating in midair that refused to budge no matter how hard you pushed it.  Imagine...well, imagine Juggernaut.  If inertial mass does not equal gravitational mass, those could be the consequences (it's highly unlikely for those to be the real consequences, but it's more impressive than the miniscule difference that would really occur).

Sweet.  I'm reminded of the Lazy Guns in Ian Banks' story Against A Dark Background - they were light but massy and weighed exactly three times as much turned upside-down as they did the right way up.

[Inumo]

This is really making my brain hurt... Ow... I think I understand maybe half of this stuff. The rest of it is just confusing the heck out of me.

[Alondro]

I'm fascinated by the whole mess of concepts.  It simply goes to show how little we still understand about the basic forms of energy underlying the structure of space itself and the hidden forces that lend themselves to what we can presently observe.

We've been describing only bits and pieces of the universe for centuries.  It may be that the whole operates on a level which the equations created thus far to characterize the various observable bits cannot describe.