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We talk about forces being fundamental, but this proves to be misleading. Fields interact, and that interaction creates the “fundamental” forces. Each of these fields, when excited enough at given location, manifests themselves as a particle. If gravity is a fundamental force, then it’s a field that interacts with other fields, and it will express itself as a particle when excited enough. Might as well call that particle a graviton.

If gravity is emergent, that doesn’t necessarily eliminate the graviton, although it would no longer be a particle. Unlike the standard model, where gravity is a ripple moving through pre-existing spacetime, in ER = EPR, spacetime is emergent, and gravity is a rippling of that spacetime network. If that’s the case, you could trace a graviton moving through spacetime, but if you looked close, you’d see you’re actually tracking movement as it’s translated through the entangled quantum states that make up spacetime, not a separate particle.

Meanwhile, General Relativity doesn’t see gravity as a force. Matter and energy bend spacetime, and that’s what we call gravity. Relativity mathematically details this action but doesn’t reveal the mechanism behind it. In my first essay, we talked about Entropic Gravity, a theory that has the flow of information as the mechanism. It’s a thermodynamic view of gravity and would erase the possibility of any sort of graviton. There’s no apparent particle in entropy.

Entropic Gravity proposes an emergent model, unlike Einstein’s view. As Einstein saw it, spacetime is fundamental, and gravity would express itself as a wave formed of pure geometry. Once again, there’s no fundamental or apparent graviton.

I expect science will eventually determine if the graviton is fundamental, apparent, or non-existent, but even if it’s not real, it’s not the silly superstition I once believed.

Our study of the graviton has also hinted at the basic difference in how General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics view spacetime. For Einstein, it was smooth, continuous, and deterministic. In a deterministic framework, from a given starting point, the same conclusion will always be reached. In sharp contrast, Quantum Mechanics sees spacetime as, to quote the Doctor, “a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff,” and a probabilistic foundation replaces certainty.

ER = EPR bridges the two.

When talking about the apparent graviton, what we see depends on how close we are. What appears to be a particle is really the translation of movement through the medium, but you only see that up close. Similarly, ER = EPR bridges General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics by allowing each to be true at their own scale levels. Pull back, and the chaos of the quantum states averages out. Think of the great mountains and valleys of Earth; if the planet were shrunk down to the size of a billiard ball, it would feel just as smooth. Einstein’s smooth spacetime is an illusion of scale. Probabilistic shifts at a quantum level become the predictable, smooth bending of spacetime, and the math works at either scale.

— Thaddeus Thomas

PS: all corrections welcome.

If you’ve missed my previous installments, ER = EPR is a conjecture that supposes wormholes and entanglement to be the same phenomenon.

How I make my physics articles: I learn about physics in the most amateur ways possible, I suppose, by listening to podcasts, watching YouTube, and asking questions of AI. These are the tools that allowed me to move past nagging questions to potential answers. Physics is a hobby, and I decided to start writing about it to a) force a more coherent thinking process and b) create a record. When I have an essay idea, I draft it and let AI tell me where I’m off scientifically and suggest grammar corrections, but I don’t accept any attempts to rewrite my work for me. Writing’s my joy, even if I realize my nonfiction prose isn’t as strong as my fiction. What’s the point if a machine takes that from me? (AI isn’t allowed near my fiction, by the way.) Even using it to test my science (or learn it in the first place) is tricky. It wants so bad to agree with you that it occasionally deforms science to be more in line with your reasoning, a happenstance that can be ferreted out by approaching the same issue from different angles.

As an example of AI correcting my science, I originally wrote: Pull back, and the chaos of the quantum fields averages out. This was wrong. The fields are on top of spacetime. In ER = EPR it’s the quantum states, not the fields, that create spacetime. The more accurate sentence now reads: Pull back, and the chaos of the quantum states averages out.

When I let the AI review the entire piece, including the critique of the AI itself, it offered nothing but praise and left three errors uncorrected. I don’t want to anthropomorphize the program, but that feels passive aggressive.

The issue I identified is known as the sycophancy problem, and I want to be clear that eliminating it entirely would lose long-term educational potential. It can cause problems for those seeking a one-time answer, and if you’re not looking to eliminate confirmation bias, I see it continuing the same issues caused by social-media algorithms. I would like to see these problems handled without losing the sycophancy entirely, however, because a teacher who looks for ways to show you where you’re right encourages ongoing studies.

For simplicity’s sake, I said earlier that I ask AI questions, but the fascinating part of the process is learning some aspect of a cosmological or quantum process and then intuitively uncovering a potential next step. I feed that hypothesis into the AI, and where a human teacher would likely shoot me down for being 20% wrong, the program explains the theories that agree with my hypothesis and corrects the aspects that are in error.

The solutions it gives me are largely theoretical physics, and I worried about that early on. Now I understand that it’s because I’m dealing with issues left unsolved by the standard model.

Image credit: The social media title image for this article comes from “Blink,” series 3, episode 10 of Doctor Who, and it’s where the “big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff” quote originated.

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In 2016, Ping Gao, Daniel Jafferis, and Aron Wall provided the proof that mathematically verified ER = EPR in an AdS universe. The 2022 team used this work as a foundation to simulate a simplified quantum space and build a holographic wormhole, and they succeeded in sending information through one opening and out the other. The transfer of information reminds me of early telephone experiments. There, a voice was broken down into information. In this case, a particle joined others at the opening of the holographic wormhole. Its information was disseminated through the other particles and then passed through the wormhole to the entangled particles on the other side. In the telephone analogy, there’s an actual wire through which electrons passed. In this case, the experiment simulated the exact mathematical signature of space being built between the openings. The disseminated information passed through to the other side and, like information being transformed back into a voice, regrouped into the particle that had been added to the first opening and which now appeared at the second.

The leaders behind this quantum computer experiment were Maria Spiropulu and Daniel Jafferis, who, along with their collaborators, demonstrated a pathway to proving that quantum information and physical geometry are deeply bound to the same underlying reality. The experiment gained worldwide attention at the time, but in the public mind, the reality of the experiment paled against the assumed promise of the headlines. We couldn’t see the value of constructing a holographic wormhole in a quantum computer if it didn’t lead to instantaneous travel across the cosmos. Meanwhile, for others, this looked like the first experimental proof of quantum gravity. As the first group missed the possible implications, the second proved to be overly optimistic. In that same year, the spikes that indicated success were replicated using standard, non-gravitational quantum scrambling. The 9-qubit model used by Spiropulu’s team was too great of a simplification to prove this was gravitational behavior and not standard quantum behavior.

When the team set out on the experiment, they knew the sophistication of quantum computers they needed was a decade away, but they decided to see what they might learn. That they succeeded came as a surprise, but for now, it’s come to be seen as a success in quantum computing and not the first experimental proof of quantum gravity. As quantum computers evolve, that 9-qubit model will one day be replaced by more complex systems. What scientists will be looking for this time is something known as fast scrambling, which is the dissemination of qubit information across the system at the fastest speed possible, as well as a transfer of complex information rather than a single particle that might achieve the same outcome under purely quantum terms.

In 2026, researchers made another attempt using an approach called the chaotic binary sparse SYK model. They moved away from a machine learning algorithm and mathematically designed a binary sparse version of the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model. This time, although it used an 8-qubit setup, the spectral chaos (fast scrambling) was preserved, and their results measured a sign-dependent asymmetry in the telemetry. That asymmetry is the mathematical signature of a quantum system behaving like an actual gravitational dual. It proved that true chaotic scrambling can be captured on current hardware.

Other teams have used many-body interference protocols to test how entanglement entropy scales, preparing us for the day we can test models using hundreds of qubits instead of a few.

If a future experiment succeeds where the 2022 effort fell short, it will provide experimental evidence for the Holographic Principle, which states that our 3+1 dimensional experience is a hologram projected from a distant 2D quantum space. Second, it will bridge Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity. Third, it will give researchers a way to study and experiment with the interior of black holes, and finally, as experimental evidence for ER = EPR, it will alter the way we view physical space, demonstrating it to be a secondary property woven from quantum entanglements.

— Thaddeus Thomas

P.S. All corrections are welcome.

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That toy universe is called an anti de Sitter Space (AdS).

A de Sitter space (dS), has a constant positive curvature and is expanding due to a positive cosmological constant (dark energy) that overpowers everything else. An anti de Sitter space is negatively curved and enclosed by a definite boundary. Our universe is currently neither, being a complex mingling of matter, dark matter, and dark energy within an observationally flat space, but as the universe continues to expand, it’s expected to settle into a de Sitter space. That expectation is based on the standard model, but evolving dark energy could cause the universe to stop expanding at some point and collapse.

Physicists model ER = EPR in a toy universe because of its boundary and something called AdS/CFT correspondence, which shows that a quantum theory on an anti-de-Sitter boundary is completely equivalent to a gravitational theory inside the bulk. (The Holographic Principle.) The math supporting this concept has been demonstrated, but translating that verification from a toy universe into our reality is a problem. One possibility, although one which I loathe, uses time as the boundary. The information would be captured at the beginning and end of time with the Block Universe in between being the holographic projection. A possibility that I do appreciate uses the gravitational horizon of gravitationally bound objects as local boundaries in place of a universal one.

Just as AdS/CFT applies the Holographic Principle to an AdS universe, a gravitationally bound theory would apply this to a black hole and perhaps to other objects like galaxies by using local gravitational horizons. Either way, the principle maps higher dimensional problems we cannot solve into a lower dimension we can solve.

In an ER = EPR universe, because Hawking radiation is entangled with particles at the event horizon, black holes become cosmic spindles upon which the threads of spacetime are woven. Some of these threads have stretched across billions of light years since first being emitted from their black holes, but cosmic expansion has kept them from ever escaping their localized pocket of the universe.

If the universe were static, radiation that escaped a black hole 13.8 billion years ago would be 13.8 billion light years away from where it began. Because the universe is expanding, and is taking that radiation along with it, that same radiation has actually traveled 46 billion light years. Even so, as the radiation travels, it eventually reaches a point where the universe ahead of it is traveling faster than the speed of light, removing any destination ahead forever from its reach.

As a point of reminder, nothing can travel through the universe faster than the speed of light, but the expansion of the universe itself is not held to that speed limit.

However, most of the black holes in our universe are not yet emitting more radiation than they absorb. A typical stellar-mass black hole is colder than the space around it, and the larger a black hole grows, the colder it becomes. Before a black hole starts emitting more radiation than it absorbs, it has to be warmer than the space around it.

Tiny, primordial black holes have been theorized, and they would have been incredibly hot, spinning out massively greater amounts of radiation than they took in. Currently, though, the vast majority of black holes are waiting for their moment, and when they finally produce excess threads of their own, they may be weaving a dead universe.

I mentioned earlier that in an ER = EPR universe, the evolving dark energy could result in the expansion reversing into a contraction. When I coupled this with black holes now sending out Hawking radiation and their resulting wormholes, an idea dawned on me. That idea was wrong.

My mistake was believing the entangled Hawking radiation might reverse the universe again and turn the contraction into another expansion. I assumed entangled particles and their wormholes were the sole component of empty space and thus equivalent to dark energy. Hawking radiation is regular energy and acts as such. However, the end result I anticipated is still possible.

If the universe were to contract, the role of black holes would change. As matter, dark matter, and black holes pack tightly together, their internal energies would couple with the shrinking spacetime fabric. If this is an ER = EPR universe, the dense network of entangled wormholes would act like a spring and, together with the extreme gravitational pressures, trigger a rebound effect and a new expansion.

In such an event, all matter would undergo a phase transition. There’s no surviving the universal comeback. However, because this is a rebound in an ER = EPR universe, quantum information is not crushed and destroyed in a singularity. The information would be scrambled but not deleted.

Something of the old universe survives in the new.

— Thaddeus Thomas

P.S. All corrections welcome.

The ER = EPR conjecture was proposed by physicists Juan Maldacena and Leonard Susskind. The Holographic Principle was proposed by Gerard ‘t Hooft and later given its string-theory interpretation by Leonard Susskind. The AdS/CFT correspondence (the toy universe mathematical application of the conjecture) was discovered by Juan Maldacena. Anti-de Sitter (AdS) space was named after physicist Willem de Sitter, and finally, the Block Universe theory was popularized by Hermann Minkowski.

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Does a vibe check sound less than serious to you? As a reason for exploring new paths, it’s perfectly reasonable. After all, that’s how Einstein’s discovery of General Relativity began.

There’s a theory in quantum mechanics called superdeterminism that suggests that everything was determined from the beginning. Entangled particles don’t have to communicate instantaneously across great distances because their states were chosen from the foundation of time. Physicists hate it.

If it seems odd that two fundamentally similar theories, the Block Universe and superdeterminism, should have had vastly different receptions, the difference is the intended audience. The Block Universe flows naturally from General Relativity, and those who work math on such cosmic scales aren’t really concerned with the philosophical difficulties. If it works, go with it. Meanwhile, superdeterminism neuters the quantum physicist by eliminating measurement independence and turning probability into a shell game.

There’s another attempt to explain away “spooky action at a distance” known as the theory of retrocausality. It states that when an entangled particle determines its spin, that causes its entangled mate to choose the opposite spin in the past. Physicists hate it too.

On the other hand, within string theory, black hole physics, and quantum gravity, physicists are fans of an idea called the ER = EPR conjecture. When there’s no observational proof, physicists stick to what produces the best math. Right now, ER = EPR isn’t something they can test, but it’s a useful mathematical analogy. As for the vibe check, this one’s a winner, and when I think of how spacetime is constructed, this is the model I use.

It’s called a conjecture. I’d assumed that was something weaker than a hypothesis, but the opposite is true. A hypothesis starts as an idea, and it can be called a hypothesis before you ever test it or gather evidence. This is called a conjecture because it’s backed by strong theoretical clues but lacks a logical proof.

The name stands for Einstein-Rosen bridges = Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen, or in other words, wormholes equal quantum entanglement. According to the conjecture, when quantum particles are entangled, they’re connected by a microscopic, non-traversable wormhole.

Now, if that’s all it was, I wouldn’t care much, but it’s much more than an idea for how entangled particles communicate. It suggests that the geometry of spacetime is entirely made of entangled particles and the tiny wormholes that connect them. That’s exciting, because when we say that mass curves the geometry of space, what does that even mean? No theory suggests there’s a pre-existing grid onto which spacetime secures itself. General Relativity tells us that spacetime is that grid. It’s not laid out on top of anything. With ER = EPR, we have actual nodes and lines that shape an emergent geometry of space and which are logically impacted by mass and energy. It’s beautiful.

I need to clarify my point on “nodes and lines” as I’m not suggesting the wormholes form a grid as we visualize it. Outside of gravitational pull, the underlying structure of spacetime is most likely frothy, more akin to the drool of a rabid dog than the iron pillars we use to construct a building. It’s also simply messy to refer to the wormholes as lines which, however you twist them, still sounds like a a filament through space. The wormholes are space, and they aren’t stable filaments but shifting probabilities of connection between the entangles pairs.

Vastly important for this particular discussion, because ER = EPR sees space and time as emergent properties, the present can be seen as the current configuration of the quantum network. Space and time are macroscopic illusions. If we view time this way, it’s generally labeled under the philosophical concept of presentism, but that term has baggage. The complexity of wormholes work like the rings of a tree, revealing their age. Philosophical presentism would ask why the present would carry a history of the past if only the “now” is real, but that’s nonsense. Whether through fossils or baryon acoustic oscillations, the past leaves its mark on the present. The past and the future simply do not exist in a higher dimensional expression of our reality.

Variations of presentism are also challenged by General Relativity. If the present is local and relative, which “now” are we referring to if only the “now” exists? If the ER = EPR conjecture is right, spacetime is fluid. Our issues with simultaneity stem from an attempt to conform a fluid reality to a rigid graph.

There’s no need for quantum particles to travel back in time or for all of existence to be predetermined. Space and time are illusory, but wasn’t that always the case? What’s given a chance to be substantial is what it means to be human. That’s not an illusion.

The conjecture does create problems, however.

When physicists say that the present, past, and future all exist at the same time, they’re referring to that Block Universe hypothesis. This coordinate plane of time seems necessary for gravity to be a result of mass bending spacetime, a core principle of General Relativity.

Hopefully, in future essays, we’ll deal with the proper theories that attempt to resolve this. For now, allow me to share my thoughts. First, the problem I described is with presentism, and I’ve said that has baggage. It seems very different to me to suggest that the future and past do not coexist with the present than it is to suggest the present is all there is. That difference is exemplified in presentism’s confusion over the present containing a record of the past.

In what I’ve described above, the past isn’t a physical space, but it used to be. It’s a chain of prior quantum configurations, what we experience as a memory-chain of lived moments. The future isn’t the next fixed coordinate but a multitude of probabilities.

What I called a “memory-chain” isn’t dependent on us as conscious observers. Quantum Darwinism is a theory of time where the environment stands witness to quantum states. It’s a redundancy of recorded history that allows multiple observers to agree on an objective past without ever having observed the quantum states directly. It’s a memory-chain created not only in our subjective mental recall but across the universe in the evidence it’s left behind. We’re used to this on a macro scale. The striations of the earth stand witness to past floods and geological violence. Fossilization captures a record of past species. BAO are the remnants of ripples through the early universe. On a micro scale, scattered photons are an example, bearing witness to a former quantum state.

Lose all the baggage. The “now” is not universal. Relativity is real, and in a universe built on superposition and entanglement, we don’t need to imagine a frozen construct of time to make relativity work. That’s always been a convenient simplification.

Time is bent by the process of mass slowing it down. If we’re stuck imagining time as a physical thing that exists and which contains essential measurements, then clocks ticking differently and the warping of spacetime become puzzles that require philosophical assumptions to solve. If time is an emergent property of a universe structured through entanglement, I see gravity working exactly as Einstein said, but with mass changing the rate of information processing in the local quantum network. We saw a little of that in the first essay when we discussed the Entropic Gravity hypothesis.

ER = EPR was proposed by Juan Maldacena and Lennard Susskind in 2013. Quantum complexity was proposed by Leonard Susskind, Adam Brown, and Bran Swingle in 2014. Quantum Darwinism was first proposed by Wojciech H. Zurek in 2003. Presentism was first conceptualized by Aristotle around 350 BCE.

I don’t meant to call Aristotle’s ideas nonsense. What frustrates me is the lumping of an attempted exploration of reality with a predefined framework and then discounting that exploration because of the faults found in the framework. It’s a logical fallacy and an example of either a Straw Man Argument or Guilt by Association.

As one final point, the Block Universe is also known as eternalism, and I want to reiterate that it is the leading hypothesis. While I see it as a mathematical convenience, someone once said eternalism was proven by gravity waves. This is not the case because gravitational ripples require four-dimensional spacetime but not a future that currently exists elsewhere. I believe the logical leap comes from assuming four-dimensional spacetime necessitates a block universe, and so, if he were really saying gravitational waves prove four-dimensional spacetime, I agree. Physicists may talk about the Block Universe as if it were established fact without actually using those words, but that’s different. They’re not required to hedge everything they say, and while it may blur the line between popular theories and established fact, it’s less confusing and provokes the imagination with possibilities, hopefully inspiring a new generation of physicists.

— Thaddeus Thomas

P.S. All corrections welcome.

Find all my essays on physics here.

COMING SOON: In physics, the exploration of ER = EPR will continue for two more weeks with postings each Thursday morning. In writing-about-writing, now that I’m back in town, I’ll start posting chapters of my book on the art of prose. However, that doesn’t meant I have a start date or a schedule. My plan is to edit chapter one and post early next week, but that’s not a promise. In fiction, I’m encouraged to return to my short story WIP and hope to start publishing fiction again soon.

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The mass of the earth curves spacetime, and it’s the time aspect I had forgotten. The earth accelerates at a constant rate across this curved geometry of the universe, but not in the three spatial dimensions. Our experience of gravity is a physical manifestation of the earth traveling through time.

By contrast, the dark energy of “empty” space creates a negative pressure that pushes space out, smoothly, in all directions. Mass has a center of gravity toward which it curves spacetime. Dark energy has no such center, and so the push that moves galaxies apart brings with it no curve, as long as we’re talking about empty space.

This is where black holes and the Cosmological Coupling Hypothesis comes into play. Standard cosmology sees the center of a black hole as a singularity. That’s a problem because information is destroyed in the singularity, and quantum mechanics says information can never be destroyed. Physicists have offered theories for how the universe might get around this, but the Cosmological Coupling Hypothesis does so by getting rid of singularities altogether. Behind the event horizon, a black hole is filled with dark energy.

The Cosmological Coupling Hypothesis gets its name from the fact that unlike the earth, a black hole doesn’t have a surface area of matter. Its surface area is the event horizon which itself is curved spacetime. According to the hypothesis, that couples the black hole to the fabric of the universe, and as the universe expands, so does the black hole. Meanwhile, the dark energy within the black hole has its own negative pressure pressing out against the event horizon, expanding the black hole in volume and in turn adding to the pressure that manifests as the expanding universe.

As a storyteller, I want to talk about the number of ways that observational cosmology has supported this hypothesis in recent months. Black holes in cold-gas galaxies are expanding despite a lack of mass-intake to trigger that expansion, and they are doing so at a rate that equals the predicted constant given by the Cosmological Coupling Hypothesis. Additionally, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) has shown that dark energy might not be a constant but rather is evolving at a rate consistent with the birth and death of stars, and thus with the birth rate of black holes. However, physicists are more cautious than storytellers. The apparent proof could be a case of confirmation bias with the expansion being drawn from some unknown variable. The idea still needs time to prove itself.

Einstein’s insight that local gravity is identical to a uniformly accelerating frame of reference is known as the Equivalence Principle. The term dark energy was coined by Michael Turner, but it was discovered earlier, in 1998, through the Nobel prize-winning work of Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt, and Adam Riess. They were the first to realize that the universe isn’t just expanding but that its expansion is accelerating. Kevin Croker is the theoretical physicist behind the Cosmological Coupling Hypothesis along with astrophysicist Duncan Farrah who also led the efforts to produce the first real-world observations supporting the concept.

Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (BAO) are patterns of galaxies across the universe, marking the death of great waves that once tore through the early universe. They act like a cosmic clock that DESI focused upon and which data Duncan Farrah studied to demonstrate the evolving nature of dark energy.

In the first 400,000 years after the Big Bang, the universe was much smaller and filled with a hot, dense plasma, too hot for electrons to attach to baryons (protons and neutrons). These free-moving electrons constantly collided with photons, keeping them coupled to the plasma. Roughly 380,000 years after the Big Bang, the temperature of the universe cooled to 3000 Kelvin, allowing baryons to trap electrons. For the first time photons were decoupled from the plasma, and over a few thousand years, space went from opaque to transparent. This escape of light gave us the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB).

In the days of that hot plasma, particles would attempt to cluster due to gravity, only to be thrust apart by their own radiation. This created acoustic waves, spherical pressure ripples that ripped through the baryonic plasma, expanding at half the speed of light. When the universe cooled enough and light decoupled from the plasma and escaped, those waves froze as patterns of baryonic matter, influencing the formation of galaxies along these ancient rims.

On today’s scale, the most massive of those rings consistently have a radius of 150 megaparsecs or 490 million light-years. That consistency allows them to act as a standard candle, and if distance makes them appear smaller than is predicted by the redshift of their light, that tells us the intervening space has expanded since that light was emitted.

The standard model assumes dark energy is a constant, but the readings from DESI suggest dark energy is evolving; the expansion of space is accelerating, but that acceleration was stronger in the past and has recently begun to weaken. That weakening dark-energy curve matches a universe where dark energy is tied to cosmologically coupled black holes: star formation slows down; fewer coupled black holes are created; and the acceleration of impact from the universe’s dark energy weakens.

On a final note, the hypothesis also rescues small black holes, formed early in our universe, as a contender for dark matter. In the standard model, that doesn’t work because the black holes would have lost so much mass to Hawking radiation in that time that they would have since evaporated or exploded. A cosmologically coupled black hole, however, can achieve a stable survival boundary where the mass lost to Hawking radiation is equivalent to the mass gained from cosmic expansion.

— Thaddeus Thomas

P.S. All corrections are welcome.

This was the second essay in the series. You can find the first one here:

Once again, I’m reminded of when I asked my early elementary school teacher if it’s possible to divide a small number by a larger one. She lied and said no because I wouldn’t be ready for that possibility for a couple more years. The way I’m learning physics, there’s no determination made whether I’m ready for the answers my questions produce. I simply get my answers. Moreover, imagine if fractions and decimals were only hypothetical and not accepted math. In this analogy, I’m new to basic arithmetic, but if I ask the question, I’ll get my answer with very little concern over what’s settled and what’s theoretical.

That’s how I’m learning, and I try to share what interests me using much of the same structure I use to pursue my answers. I highlight connections between ideas, and these will regularly fall in a few areas: quantum mechanics, gravity and spacetime, deep space and dark energy, and black holes.

As for what’s theoretical and what’s settled, everything I touched upon today should be settled physics until we reach the Cosmological Coupling Hypothesis. I’ve noted that the standard model considers dark energy a constant, but I didn’t mention that it also states that gravity once held expansion back and only recently did acceleration of expansion begin. That’s very different from Farrah’s interpretations of the DESI information.

Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (BAO) and their birth in the early years of the universe seem settled. DESI is simply the instrumentation by which dark energy is studied. Farrah’s interpretation of those results makes certain assumptions that are being rigorously challenged because they support a hypothesis that would upend our understanding of black holes and dark energy, as well as potentially undermine the standard candles and rulers scientists have relied upon in their studies of the universe.

Find all my essays on physics here.

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In the empty space between galaxies, those qubits fill the volume of space, achieving maximum entropy, which in quantum mechanics refers to informational density. This density of information in what we see as empty space expands the volume of space. We call that information dark energy.

By contrast, according to something known as the Holographic Principle, massive objects don’t draw information into their volume but onto their surface area, and a recent hypothesis by Erik Verlinde tells us that from this quantum entropy, gravity emerges. Einstein’s General Relativity told us that mass curves spacetime, creating our experience of gravity, but Relativity doesn’t tell us how this happens. Theories have been sought that would produce gravity as a fundamental force alongside electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces, but in Verlinde’s theory of Entropic Gravity, gravity isn’t one of the fundamental forces but rather emerges from them.

In standard cosmology, we have both dark energy (expanding the universe) and dark matter (holding the outer edges of galaxies together), but in the Entropic Gravity hypothesis, dark energy isn’t a smooth, repulsive fluid but (as described above) the fundamental microscopic data of the universe. Dark matter is done away with entirely. In its place, matter and dark energy interact with the bordering spacetime between them, creating the elasticity needed to keep the outermost systems in place. In these areas, Entropic Gravity offers solutions that Relativity cannot, but under the right circumstances, from the computations of Entropic Gravity, the equations of General Relativity emerge.

David Mermin coined the phrase “shut up and do the math.” Max Tegmark proposed the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis. Max Planck determined the Planck length. Leonard Susskind and Gerard ‘t Hooft developed the Holographic Principle within String Theory, and Erik Verlinde proposed Entropic Gravity.

In early 2026, the James Webb Space Telescope mapped a web of interconnected clumps of dark matter, the very substance Entropic Gravity calls illusory. It accomplished this by measuring how dark matter’s gravity warps the light of background galaxies. In standard cosmology it’s explained as a network of real, physical particles, yet undiscovered. Entropic Gravity describes this gravitational web as the strain imposed upon bordering spacetime by the interaction of matter and quantum information.

The outer arms of a galaxy are an example of a low-acceleration zone, which is one of those areas Relativity cannot explain without the addition of a mass we cannot see. Entropic Gravity, however, can.

Does this prove Entropic Gravity? No. These are all open questions, but my intent is not to prove which is the correct interpretation of the universe. Instead, this is the opening of the interesting story I wish to share about the math we call physics.

— Thaddeus Thomas

P.S. All corrections are welcome.

I have no idea how soon or how long it will be before the next entry in this series. The opening to this essay has been gnawing at me for days, and now my mind can move on to other things.

I have no background in any of this, but its something I ponder before going to bed. For a while, I’ve thought that the best way to continue my informal studies is to write about them, and so the writing has begun. Hopefully, there will be interest in seeing it continue.

Find all my essays on physics here.