Why Do I Feel A Strange Force Pulling Me Toward Things I Can’t See?

Imagine this: You’re hiking on a remote mountain trail when you suddenly feel a tug — as if something unseen is pulling you toward a hidden path. There’s nothing visible, no wind, no shifting rocks — just that eerie feeling of being drawn toward something.

What if this strange sensation wasn’t just in your head, but linked to a deeper force — one woven into the very fabric of reality itself? Some physicists believe this ‘pull’ might not be traditional gravity at all, but rather an emergent effect of hidden quantum information shaping the space around you. Could gravity, the force we’ve trusted for centuries, actually be an illusion?

On November 30, 2022, a team of physicists teleported information through a tiny “wormhole” inside a quantum computer. ​It wasn’t a sci-fi portal large enough to walk through, but a profound experiment.

A quantum bit emerged on the other side as if it had traveled via a tunnel in spacetime. This mind-bending achievement hinted that Einstein’s gravity – our traditional view of spacetime – might be just one side of a deeper reality.

In fact, some scientists now boldly propose that gravity isn’t a fundamental force at all, but rather an emergent phenomenon, an illusion woven from the quantum threads of information. If they’re right, our everyday experience of gravity – from an apple falling to Earth to planets orbiting the Sun – is not what it seems.

A century after Einstein’s general relativity reshaped gravity as the curvature of spacetime, a new generation of theories is challenging that paradigm and raising a thrilling question: Is gravity itself an emergent byproduct of something more fundamental?

Einstein’s Masterpiece and the Mysteries It Can’t Explain

Einstein’s general relativity has stood for over 100 years as our best description of gravity. It portrays gravity as the warping of spacetime by mass and energy.

From the bending of starlight during eclipses to the recent detection of gravitational waves, experiment after experiment has confirmed Einstein’s predictions with stunning precision. Yet even Einstein’s theory faces puzzles. At the smallest scales – the quantum realm – general relativity breaks down, yielding infinities and contradictions​.

We have long struggled to reconcile gravity with quantum mechanics, the rulebook for atoms and particles. And on the largest cosmic scales, astronomers see anomalies: galaxies spinning too fast, galaxy clusters bending light more than visible matter can account for, and the universe’s expansion mysteriously accelerating. In the conventional view, these oddities are explained by invoking invisible entities – dark matter and dark energy – which together make up about 95% of the universe’s content​.

But what if our theory of gravity itself needs an overhaul?

That is the daring idea behind emergent gravity. Physicist Erik Verlinde of the University of Amsterdam argues that the effects we attribute to dark matter are actually a sign that gravity’s behavior changes on cosmic scales.​

“Dark matter is an illusion caused by an incomplete understanding of gravity.”

​In an interview at CERN, Verlinde put it bluntly.

Rather than tweaking Einstein’s equations by adding mysterious mass, Verlinde and others suggest that gravity itself might “emerge” from more fundamental ingredients, much like a hologram projecting a 3D image from a flat film​.

It’s a bold rewrite of gravity – not as a basic force, but as a byproduct of microscopic bits of information and entropy.

Gravity as an Emergent Force: Entropy, Information, and Entropic Gravity

Imagine gravity not as a pull from mass, but as a kind of thermodynamic effect. It is the universe’s quest for increasing entropy (disorder) manifesting as an attractive force.

This is the essence of entropic gravity (emergent gravity), a theory that has gained both interest and controversy. In 2010, Erik Verlinde published a paper proposing that Newton’s gravity law and even Einstein’s equations can arise from the statistics of tiny unseen “atoms” of spacetime information​

According to this view, gravity is not fundamental at all, but an entropic force. This force is analogous to how pressure emerges from the collective motion of gas molecules, or how a stretched rubber band retracts because of entropy, not because of a fundamental rubber-pulling force.

In Verlinde’s picture (inspired by decades of hints from black hole physics and quantum information theory), space itself is built from “spacetime atoms” or quantum bits (qubits) of information.​

When these quanta are entangled – a quantum correlation linking particles over distance – they generate the fabric of space and the geometry we call gravity. Different parts of space are “glued” together by quantum entanglement.​

As matter moves and entropy changes, the entanglement entropy shifts, and the result, on large scales, looks like the force of gravity​

In simple terms, gravity emerges from the information associated with the positions of matter – much like how a coherent picture emerges from millions of pixels. Our weight on Earth could then be understood as a kind of entropy effect.

Earth’s mass distorts the entanglement information around it, and we feel that as a gravitational attraction.

​“Gravity can be derived from the microscopic units that make up space–time. These ‘space–time molecules’ are units of quantum information (qubits) that are entangled with each other.”

Verlinde says.

One remarkable outcome of this theory is that it naturally produces a slight extra gravity at extremely low accelerations – precisely where galaxies show the need for dark matter. Entropic gravity predicts a deviation from Newton’s inverse-square law at very low gravitational accelerations​

In fact, it relates to a known critical acceleration scale (~1×10^−10 m/s²) at which galaxies’ rotation curves go flat. This is the same scale highlighted by the modified gravity theory MOND, long noted by astronomer Mordehai Milgrom​.

Verlinde’s emergent gravity provided a theoretical foundation for this behavior​ explaining the flat rotation of galaxies without invoking unseen dark matter particles. Essentially, the extra “gravity” in galactic outskirts could come from the entropy associated with the universe’s unseen dark energy reservoir.

“An additional term…strengthening gravity over what is expected, and as a result, the existence of dark matter is ‘spoofed’.”

​Verlinde’s Emergent Gravity.

Testing Emergent Gravity in Galaxies

A bold theory lives or dies by experimental tests. Over the past few years, astronomers have begun to pit Verlinde’s emergent gravity against real-world data. In 2016, a team led by Margot Brouwer tested Verlinde’s predictions using gravitational lensing – the bending of light by gravity – around over 33,000 galaxies.​

The result? Emergent gravity held up as well as the standard dark matter model in explaining the lensing patterns.​

In other words, given the observations, one could equally well attribute the extra gravity to invisible dark matter or to Verlinde’s entropy-based effect – a tantalizing success for the new theory. Brouwer’s test was hailed as emergent gravity’s “first test in the real universe,” and it did not falsify the idea​.

However, the debate is far from settled. More recent analyses and tests at larger scales (such as galaxy clusters or the cosmic microwave background) continue to probe whether emergent gravity can fully replace dark matter or if subtle discrepancies arise.

Some studies report that certain galaxy observations don’t fit as neatly with Verlinde’s formulas. They suggest that if gravity is emergent, we might be missing pieces of the puzzle.

Skeptics point out that dark matter, for all its mystery, provides a simple fit to a wide range of data, whereas emergent gravity must work hard to match every observation without fine-tuning. The jury is still out. However, the key takeaway is that scientists are taking these ideas seriously enough to test them – and so far, emergent gravity hasn’t been ruled out.

The coming years, with more precise data, will determine if this bold reimagining of gravity can stand alongside Einstein’s theory as a valid description of our universe.

The Holographic Principle: Is Our Universe a Hologram?

Parallel to the entropic gravity idea, another revolutionary concept has been percolating through theoretical physics: the holographic principle. This principle suggests that all the information in a volume of space can be described on the boundary of that space. Much like a hologram encodes a 3D image on a 2D surface.

Incredibly, it implies that our 3D universe (with 1 dimension of time) might itself be a kind of holographic projection of information encoded on a distant 2D surface.​

It’s not saying the universe is fake or a computer simulation, but that the fundamental description of reality might exist in fewer dimensions than we experience.​

This mind-bending idea first emerged from studies of black hole physics in the 1970s-90s. Physicists Jacob Bekenstein and Stephen Hawking discovered that black holes have entropy and a temperature.

Remarkably, a black hole’s entropy is proportional not to its volume, but to the area of its event horizon. This was a huge clue that information in gravitational systems might be stored on surfaces. John Wheeler’s aphorism “it from bit” – the notion that physical things (“it”) fundamentally arise from information (“bit”).

However, Bekenstein’s speculations in the 1980s and 90s presaged the idea that “the physical world [could be] made of information, with energy and matter as incidentals.”

​”Could we, as William Blake memorably penned, ‘see a world in a grain of sand’, or is that idea no more than ‘poetic license’?”

Jacob Bekenstein

The holographic principle was made concrete in 1997 by Juan Maldacena. Juan stunned the physics world with a discovery in string theory. He found a mathematical duality between two theories​.

One was a universe without gravity in lower-dimensional flat spacetime, and the other was a universe with gravity in a higher-dimensional curved spacetime (specifically a type of space called Anti-de Sitter space)​.

They were exactly equivalent descriptions – physics in the “bulk” volume with gravity mirrored physics on the “boundary” with no gravity. This Maldacena duality (also known as AdS/CFT correspondence) was the first dramatic evidence that a consistent universe with gravity can emerge from a lower-dimensional world without gravity.​

In Maldacena’s toy model, our familiar 3D gravity was like a hologram projected from a 2D quantum system on the boundary. Physicists were giddy: it was as if our universe were the 3D image, and the fundamental reality lay on a distant surface encoding everything.​

Leading theorists like Leonard Susskind championed the holographic principle and helped generalize it. It gained traction as a possible key to quantum gravity: a way to unite Einstein’s relativity with quantum physics.

The idea was “the bendy space-time continuum described by general relativity is really a quantum system of particles in disguise.”​

The prior idea became a guiding light. According to the holographic principle, space-time and gravity emerge from underlying quantum information, much as a 3D hologram emerges from a 2D pattern​.

What does this mean in plainer terms?

“Imagine that everything you see, feel and hear in three dimensions (and even your perception of time) in fact emanates from a flat two-dimensional field. The idea is similar to that of ordinary holograms where a three-dimensional image is encoded in a two-dimensional surface… However, this time, the entire universe is encoded.”​

Professor Kostas Skenderis of University of Southampton explains with an analogy

In other words, our world with all its richness might be like a cosmic projection – very real to us, yet fundamentally arising from information painted on a distant boundary.

Spacetime from Quantum Entanglement

The holographic principle suggests a startling vision: spacetime itself may be woven from quantum entanglement. If true, this flips our understanding – instead of particles moving through space, maybe the relationships (entanglements) among quantum bits create the space.

Mark Van Raamsdonk, a theoretical physicist at UBC, illustrated this beautifully. He asked: what happens if you gradually remove entanglement from a holographic quantum system?

His thought experiment found that as entanglement is stripped away, the emergent space begins to tear apart, forming something like a “big rip”​

“If you take away the entanglement, your space-time just falls apart… if you wanted to build up a space-time, you’d want to start entangling qubits together in particular ways.”​

Mark Van Raamsdonk

This led him to conclude that entanglement is the “glue” holding space together.​

“Entanglement is the fabric of space-time. It’s the thread that binds the system together.”

​High-energy theorist Brian Swingle put it another way.

In modern research, physicists use tensor networks (graphical webs of entangled qubits) as models of emergent spacetime geometry. Curved space-times emerge naturally from entanglement in these models via holography​

Think of a massive LEGO construction where each Lego block is a quantum bit, and entanglement snaps the blocks together. The result is the smooth structure we identify as the space around us​

The more entangled the pieces, the more “connected” and smooth the emergent space. This is a radical shift: it suggests that to understand why space has the shape it does (and thus why gravity behaves as it does), we should study patterns of quantum entanglement as much as we study masses and energies.

A Quantum Wormhole in the Lab

For years, the holographic principle and emergent spacetime were largely theoretical playgrounds – fascinating, but with little experimental evidence. That is rapidly changing. The wormhole experiment in 2022 that opened this story is a prime example.

By manipulating entangled qubits on Google’s quantum computer, researchers led by Maria Spiropulu created a scenario equivalent to sending a particle through a wormhole in a tiny 2D holographic universe​.

No actual spacetime was ripped open – what they did was show that quantum entanglement and a simple form of gravity (a wormhole) can mimic each other. The qubits behaved as if a message had traversed a short wormhole, precisely as holographic duality predicted.

This achievement was hailed as “quantum gravity experiment on a chip.”​

It is a small step toward testing these ideas in the lab. More importantly, it supports the idea that the universe’s geometry (wormholes and all) has a dual description in quantum information terms.

It is evidence that “space-time and gravity emerge from quantum effects much as a 3D hologram projects out of a 2D pattern.”​

In other words, the fundamental bits of physics might not be little particles in space, but bits of quantum information – and space and gravity arise when those bits interact in certain ways.

Even beyond the lab, physicists are hunting for holographic fingerprints in nature. In 2017, an international team studying the cosmic microwave background (CMB) – the afterglow of the Big Bang – reported that a holographic model of the early universe fit the data as well as the standard cosmology​

They suggested that in the universe’s infancy, spacetime may have been two-dimensional, only “geometrizing” into the familiar 3D space after a certain epoch​

“Substantial evidence” for a holographic universe, the team claimed, could be found in the pattern of primordial fluctuations imprinted on the CMB​

phys.org. While this is just one piece of research and far from a consensus, it shows that emergent gravity ideas are being explored even in cosmic observations.

The New Gravity Thinkers: Voices from the Frontier

These radical ideas have a cadre of passionate theoretical physicists behind them. Many are respected leaders in gravity and quantum physics, lending credibility to concepts that at first sound like science fiction. Here are a few of the key figures and their insights:

• Erik Verlinde – A string theorist-turned iconoclast, Verlinde introduced entropic gravity in 2010 and expanded it in 2016 to explain away dark matter​. He envisions gravity emerging from the interplay of matter, entropy and an underlying reservoir of dark energy. Verlinde emphasizes that gravity isn’t being modified so much as derived from deeper laws.
• “The aim of emergent gravity is to derive the equations that govern gravity from a microscopic quantum structure, using ingredients from quantum information theory,” he explains​. Verlinde’s daring claim that “all of our current laws of nature will be seen as emergent” if this program succeeds​. It underscores how profoundly this could shift our worldview.
• He also connects with big puzzles: “I realized that [emergent gravity] implied a relation between the phenomena associated with dark matter and the presence of dark energy.”
• In essence, Verlinde is attempting to kill two birds (dark matter and dark energy) with one stone: a new theory of gravity.
• Juan Maldacena – One of the world’s top theoretical physicists, Maldacena’s work gave concrete form to the holographic principle. His 1997 discovery of AdS/CFT duality showed that a universe with gravity can be fully equivalent to a quantum system with one less dimension.
• Maldacena’s insight has driven two decades of research and earned him comparisons to Einstein for its impact. His work implies Einstein’s gravity could be a cosmic “shadow” of quantum dynamics on a boundary. Every time physicists demonstrate a new aspect of AdS/CFT – like the quantum wormhole experiment – Maldacena’s idea gains more heft in describing the real universe.
• Leonard Susskind – A co-founder of string theory and a pioneer of holography, Susskind famously quarreled with Hawking over black hole information, ultimately showing that information must be preserved (a triumph for quantum theory).
• He coined the term “holographic principle” and popularized the idea that the world is a hologram. In 2013, Susskind (with Maldacena) proposed “ER = EPR”, the audacious conjecture that every pair of entangled particles is connected by a (tiny) Einstein-Rosen wormhole​.
• EPR refers to Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen entanglement, and ER to Einstein-Rosen bridges (wormholes); saying EPR=ER literally ties quantum entanglement to geometric tunnels. This was another step in uniting spacetime and quantum physics.
• Susskind’s work means that when two particles are mysteriously connected over distance, there might be a spacetime thread (a wormhole of sorts) linking them – a visual way to grasp how entanglement builds structure.
• Mark Van Raamsdonk – His thought experiments solidified the idea that entanglement quantity corresponds to spatial connectivity​. Van Raamsdonk likes to describe a spacetime gradually emerging as you entangle more parts of a system​.
• “Along the outside of the figure, individual particles become entangled… As more particles become entangled, the three-dimensional structure of space-time emerges,” he explains. He even likened spacetime to a “memory chip” of a quantum computer – cut the chip in two (remove entanglement between halves) and space itself splits apart​.
• His work won the 2015 New Horizons in Physics Prize and inspires the idea that distance and geometry might literally be an accounting of entanglement between unseen constituents.
• Ted Jacobson & T. Padmanabhan – Two physicists who independently had earlier insights that gravity and thermodynamics are deeply connected. In 1995, Ted Jacobson derived Einstein’s field equations by assuming the universe obeys thermodynamic laws on local horizons. This was a wake-up call that perhaps Einstein’s equation $R_{\mu\nu}-\frac{1}{2}Rg_{\mu\nu}=8\pi T_{\mu\nu}$ is not fundamental, but rather like an equation of state, akin to the gas laws.
• Later, T. Padmanabhan in the 2000s also championed the view that “gravity is the thermodynamics of unknown microstructures”. Their work laid groundwork for entropic gravity by pointing out that area-entropy and heat-flow relations could imply gravity equations. In short, they provided a bridge between Einstein and Boltzmann, suggesting gravity is what you get when a deeper statistical system is at play.

These are just a few of the scientific visionaries pushing the boundaries of how we think about gravity. What they share is a conviction that Einstein’s relativity, brilliant as it is, is not the final word. There is something deeper – whether it’s quantum entanglement, information, entropy, or new laws – from which spacetime itself might emerge.

“Our perspective on the building blocks of nature would change drastically.”

As Verlinde puts it, if emergent gravity is true​.

We would no longer see the world as made of distinct particles and forces at a fundamental level but as a kind of mosaic of information that under the right conditions gives rise to those particles and forces​.

Why It Matters: From Cosmic Puzzles to Everyday Experience

Beyond the esoteric elegance of these theories, one might ask: Why does it matter if gravity is emergent? For one, it addresses some of the biggest mysteries in physics.

If emergent gravity (or a holographic universe) is correct, it could solve the riddle of dark matter and dark energy in one sweep – revealing them not as strange substances but as signs of gravity’s information-theoretic underpinnings​

It would also mean we finally have a path to unify gravity with quantum mechanics. Instead of shoehorning quantum bits into a pre-existing spacetime, spacetime itself falls naturally out of the quantum bits.

This could be the key to a theory of quantum gravity that physicists have sought for decades, potentially explaining what really goes on inside black holes or at the Big Bang.

There’s also a profoundly philosophical impact. The notion that “space and time are not fundamental” forces us to rethink reality. It echoes some ancient ideas (the world as Maya/illusion in philosophy, or the universe as a dream of information), now backed by cutting-edge physics.

It blurs the line between the material and the abstract – is the universe a grand information processing system? Such questions capture the imagination, leading to best-selling books and viral videos about the holographic universe. For the scientifically curious public, few ideas are as awe-inspiring as “we might be living in a hologram”​

It’s a concept that connects with our everyday experience in a surprising way: the floor you stand on, the gravity holding you down, might be akin to a holographic projection from distant cosmic data.

This doesn’t make it any less real – just as a rainbow is no less beautiful once you understand it’s an optical illusion – but it adds a layer of wonder beneath the mundane.

Importantly, emergent gravity ideas tie into technology and future experiments. If gravity is linked to quantum information, then advances in quantum computing and quantum teleportation (like the wormhole experiment) directly inform gravity research.

We might one day manipulate gravity by tweaking quantum entanglement – a far-fetched idea now, but so was quantum teleportation a few decades ago. Understanding gravity’s quantum roots could also lead to new insights in cosmology (e.g. figuring out what happened before the Big Bang or how space transitioned from quantum fuzz to classical expansion).

Even in everyday tech, general relativity already helps run GPS satellites and quantum physics runs our electronics; a synthesis might yield new applications we can’t yet foresee, perhaps in precision sensors or secure communications that exploit gravitational effects.

Curiosity and the Cosmic Conversation: Bringing the Public Along

These developments in gravitational physics aren’t just confined to academic papers – they’re fueling a broader conversation in science media and forums. Publications like Quanta Magazine, Scientific American, and channels like Veritasium and PBS Space Time on YouTube have produced accessible stories and videos on emergent gravity and the holographic principle, racking up millions of views.

The public’s appetite for such “reality-bending” ideas is huge. After all, who wouldn’t be intrigued by headlines like “Is the Universe a Hologram?”, “Einstein Might Have Been Wrong about Gravity,” or “We Might Not Need Dark Matter After All”?

In short, gravity’s new revolution carries significant social currency – it makes us all feel like we’re in on a deep cosmic secret.

Big paradigm shifts often require not just scientific persuasion, but cultural absorption. When Einstein proposed $E=mc^2$ and warped spacetime, it took years and world events (like the 1919 eclipse) to cement those ideas in the public consciousness.

Today’s emergent gravity researchers similarly benefit from public interest: more eyeballs and minds on the problem can spur fresh perspectives and certainly help inspire the next generation of physicists. The awe that readers feel translates into support for fundamental research and education. It reminds us that science isn’t a finished book of facts, but a living story – one that we are all part of, as curious beings trying to understand our universe.

A New Gravity for a New Era

The exploration of emergent gravity, entropic forces, and holographic space-time is redefining one of the most basic features of reality. We started with Einstein’s elegant geometric theory of gravity, which has guided us for a century.

Now, like explorers venturing beyond a well-charted island, physicists are pushing into the quantum seas that surround Einstein’s map. They are finding that the fabric of reality might be stitched together by information – a discovery as poetic as it is mind-boggling.

For now, Einstein’s theory still works beautifully for all practical purposes. You don’t need quantum entanglement to launch a satellite or calculate a black hole’s orbit.

But if these new ideas prove correct, then hidden beneath the smooth curvature of space-time is a world of atoms of space, long threads of entanglement and cosmic bits flipping like coins.

Gravity, in this new paradigm, would be like the tip of an iceberg, visible and strong, but supported by a vast unseen base of quantum interactions.

The coming years promise to be exciting. New telescopes and experiments will test gravity on larger scales and higher precision, quantum computers will grow in power to simulate larger holographic universes. Theorists will refine the mathematics of emergent spacetime (perhaps even extending holographic duality to a cosmos like ours with dark energy, as Verlinde attempted​

We stand at the cusp of what might be a new Copernican revolution in gravity. Einstein knocked Newton off his absolute space and time pedestal; now quantum information could do the same to Einstein, showing that space and time themselves are secondary, not primary.

The reality shift for the rest of us is profound. We began by asking: Is gravity an illusion? After this journey, we see that gravity is very real to us – but it may be the emergent song of a deeper quantum melody.

The next time you drop a pen and watch it hit the floor, consider for a moment that what you are really witnessing is a kind of exquisite machinery of the universe: trillions of tiny bits of quantum information working in concert to create the force we call gravity, pulling the pen downward. It’s as if the pen and the Earth share an invisible web of connections – and in falling, the pen is simply following the threads of its reality.

In the end, whether or not these specific theories pan out, they have already succeeded in expanding our imaginations. They force us to re-examine old assumptions (“What even is spacetime, anyway?”) and to marvel at how much we still have to learn about the cosmos.