The Illusion Of Gravity

Gravity is an illusion, says the Scientific American in its issue of November 2005. Well, then how come that I cannot fly like a bird? Oh no, smiles Professor Juan Maldacena. Gravity, he explains, is one of the dimensions of space, and it might be a holographic phenomenon caused by the interactions of quantum particles and fields in a lower-dimensional domain. It sounds good, professor, but are we closer now to the understanding of reality than we were last October? As you know, Newton thought that gravitation was the attractive force between masses of matter but Einstein concluded that it resulted from the warping of space and time by objects that follow the geometrical curvature of the cosmos. Now let us change a bit the topic and talk about evidence. We still do not have the evidence that the sun will rise tomorrow. Yes, the probability for it is high. But science is an evidence-based enterprise and we just don’t have the evidence for tomorrow’s sunrise, have we? Mind you, chaos, chance or quantum entanglement show that nature does not care much about laws of causality. Hi, a bunch of atoms just defied gravity in my room and jumped to the moon. Well, class starts at 8: 00 in New York but now it is already 8: 13, so I am late. Did time cause me being late? Or maybe it was the traffic. Or perhaps I was late because I misplaced my briefcase. No problem, gravity is just an illusion, let us hop to San Francisco, and I am early. And now, if you don’t mind, I have a question: Does your mind create holographic phenomena? And can we comprehend the concrete universe through the abstract metaphors of matter, energy, space, time and gravity?