This conversation spans:
spacetime emergence from entanglement,
why the cosmological constant problem may be a red herring,
how time itself can be defined without assuming time (via modular Hamiltonians and density matrices),
what computational complexity has to do with black hole interiors,
why his twin brother Herman (also a theoretical physicist at Princeton) was formative to his thinking,
and why Verlinde believes the right attitude for a scientist is to follow your own nose, not your professor’s.
Erik Verlinde is a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Amsterdam, and in 2010, he dropped a landmark paper that made physicists deeply uncomfortable: he derived Newton’s gravitational force and Newton’s F=ma from entropy. Not analogous to entropy. Literally from entropy. For context, I wrote extensively about both his and Ted Jacobson’s entropic gravity approaches here, where I tried to understand the math and the controversy before this interview. Errors in that piece ar…
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