Gravity May Not Be a Force at All — The Emergent Gravity Hypothesis

Added: 2026-05-28

[00:00:00]Gravity is the most [music] familiar force in your life. It holds you to the ground. It moves the planets. And yet, there is a serious hypothesis in modern physics that gravity is not a force at all.

[00:00:11]>> [music] >> To see how that could be, think of temperature. It feels basic, irreducible, >> [music] >> but it is not. It is the motion of countless invisible molecules. Pressure is the same, not a thing in itself, but the statistics of many small collisions.

[00:00:25]Both are completely real. They are simply not fundamental. In 2010, the Dutch physicist Erik Verlinde [music] proposed that gravity may belong to that same category, not a fundamental force, but an emergent [music] one. His idea builds on a strange result from black hole physics, that the information inside any region of space can be written on its boundary.

[00:00:45]>> [music] >> When matter moves, that pattern shifts, and the cosmos, as it always does, tends toward higher entropy, toward disorder.

[00:00:53]What we feel as the pull of gravity in this picture [music] is reality drifting toward its more probable arrangements.

[00:00:59]Gravity would not be a thread pulling us down. It would be the universe rearranging itself. And the idea makes a testable claim.

[00:01:06]>> [music] >> In 2016, Verlinde showed it could produce extra gravity on the scale of galaxies, possibly explaining how they spin without any invisible dark matter.

[00:01:16]>> [music] >> This must be said clearly, emergent gravity is not established physics. It is one [music] hypothesis among several.

[00:01:22]The early tests measuring how light bends around galaxies have given mixed results, and many physicists remain unconvinced. [music] It may yet turn out to be wrong, but the possibility alone is humbling, that the force we know best, the one we feel in every single step, >> [music] >> might not be woven into the foundation of reality, but rises from a deeper layer we have only begun to glimpse.

[00:01:45]Perhaps gravity does not pull us at all.

[00:01:48]Perhaps we are simply falling toward disorder with the [music] rest of the universe.