Gravity Doesn't Exist - The Earth Really Sucks

I get tired of reading things like this, but hey, since it has gotten the attention of the NY Times, no less, it is fair game to report here.

Eric Verlinde's latest bombshell is now making the news in popular media. In it, he is claiming that gravity is merely an "illusion" (I hate that word).

But what if it’s all an illusion, a sort of cosmic frill, or a side effect of something else going on at deeper levels of reality?

So says Erik Verlinde, 48, a respected string theorist and professor of physics at the University of Amsterdam, whose contention that gravity is indeed an illusion has caused a continuing ruckus among physicists, or at least among those who profess to understand it. Reversing the logic of 300 years of science, he argued in a recent paper, titled “On the Origin of Gravity and the Laws of Newton,” that gravity is a consequence of the venerable laws of thermodynamics, which describe the behavior of heat and gases.

String theorists have abandoned publishing in peer-reviewed journals? Well, why not? They can make huge waves simply by putting their speculations on ArXiv and get in the news.

Edit: interestingly enough, there are already counter argument against Verlinde's proposal.

Zz.