Gravity Doesn't Exist?

This paper argues that gravity "doesn't exist." More specifically the author Erik Verlinde, described by the New York Times as a respected string theorist and professor of physics at the University of Amsterdam, says gravity is emergent from the laws of thermodynamics.

If you have difficulty understanding the paper, do not be alarmed, according to this article in the Times: "some of the best physicists in the world say they don’t understand Dr. Verlinde’s paper, and many are outright skeptical."

Our Universe as a Hologram?

New Scientists Article

For many months, the GEO600 team-members had been scratching their heads over inexplicable noise that is plaguing their giant detector. Then, out of the blue, a researcher approached them with an explanation. In fact, he had even predicted the noise before he knew they were detecting it. According to Craig Hogan, a physicist at the Fermilab particle physics lab in Batavia, Illinois, GEO600 has stumbled upon the fundamental limit of space-time - the point where space-time stops behaving like the smooth continuum Einstein described and instead dissolves into "grains", just as a newspaper photograph dissolves into dots as you zoom in. "It looks like GEO600 is being buffeted by the microscopic quantum convulsions of space-time," says Hogan.

If this doesn't blow your socks off, then Hogan, who has just been appointed director of Fermilab's Center for Particle Astrophysics, has an even bigger shock in store: "If the GEO600 result is what I suspect it is, then we are all living in a giant cosmic hologram."