this post was submitted on 03 May 2025
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I love that we're this far along in physics and the question of "what even is gravity anyway?" Is still fundamentally unsolved.
My favourite theory that I've seen so far is "entropy increases, and black holes have maximum entropy of anything in the universe, so everything is always trying to become a black hole." Stuff falls downward just because that's the easiest and most immediate way of making progress towards being a black hole.
Obviously, this is a layman's understanding.
Interesting theory. On the other hand, if everything would diverge instead, like with the expansion of the universe, we also reach maximum entropy. So why wouldn't gravity be repellent?
My understanding is it's because black holes are the way to maximum entropy. Widely dispersed material has lots of potential energy and lots of possible states, but black holes are "the end" - there's no further change possible once you get there. There is no state of matter or spacetime with more entropy than that.
Ohh that makes quite a lot of sense. I always imagined entropy increase as more things are spread out, but i never considered gravity so turns out I was assuming repulsive(electromagnetic) forces when talking about entropy because we usually always considers a system of molecules