This is an episode about an anti-reductionistic approach to gravity.
Ginestra Bianconi is a Professor of Applied Mathematics at Queen Mary University of London, and one of the people who built modern network science (the Bianconi-Barabási model, Bose-Einstein condensation in networks, the whole higher-order networks program). Her paper Gravity from Entropy, now published in Physical Review D, does something I did not expect a network theorist to pull off. It derives gravity. From an entropy. We cover:
Why gravity is the one force that breaks the reductionist story. It isn’t particles bumping into particles. It’s geometry, and geometry is the stage every other force has to perform on.
She is careful about this: her theory extends Einstein, it doesn’t overturn him. The equations reduce exactly to his in the low-energy limit, then start to disagree precisely where we can begin to test them.
Matter and geometry get treated on the same “footing,” both written as metrics and compared by the in…
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