Weighty matters

What on Earth is going on with the theory of gravity?

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/13/science/13gravity.html

I would have to subscribe to find out

whoa, crazy stuff. Who knows though -- if Newton was proved wrong by Einstein, why not this guy showing Einstein to be wrong..

“For me gravity doesn’t exist,” said Dr. Verlinde [....]

In the third para of the Times article, the link to his controversial essay does work. Look at the top right side of the linked page. The PDF download. Don't need a subscription.

(Not pretending I understand string theory. I don’t.)

xlizellx wrote: whoa, crazy stuff. Who knows though -- if Newton was proved wrong by Einstein, why not this guy showing Einstein to be wrong..

It's not so much Newton being proved "wrong" by Einstein, but that Einstein provided a much broader perspective, within which Newton's laws are a close approximation that apply in the "special case" of almost everything we observe in normal everyday life.

"Dr. Verlinde is not an obvious candidate to go off the deep end."

"He made his first big splash as a graduate student when he invented Verlinde Algebra and the Verlinde formula, which are important in string theory, the so-called theory of everything, which posits that the world is made of tiny wriggling strings."

Can someone explain how a person who posits that the words is made of tiny incomprehensible wriggling strings is the exact type of person you'd expect to go off the deep end?

It may not actually be a deep end.

Perhaps all of its contents are visible on the surface.