Gravity is one of the few things in life that we absolutely take for granted. When we step out of the bed in the morning we expect to still remain grounded to the floor and for nothing to have changed. While there are many reasons and theories that explain why this happens there is still a lot that we do not know about why gravity exists, but physicist Melvin Vopson from the University of Portsmouth might have found another theory worth exploring. According to his research, gravity could be a result of the Universe performing computations.
This can be hard to wrap our brains around, after all the universe is not a sentient being, but as Vopson explains “My findings in this study fit with the thought that the Universe might work like a giant computer, or our reality is a simulated construct. […] Just like computers try to save space and run more efficiently, the Universe might be doing the same. It’s a new way to think about gravity – not just as a pull, but as something that happens when the Universe is trying to stay organized.”
This is not a new theory for Vopson, who has been exploring this new avenue of thinking for a few years now. In fact, in 2022 he proposed the second law of infodynamics along with Serban Lepadatu from the Jeremiah Horrocks Institute. This new law builds off the second law of thermodynamics, which says that entropy (or disorder) always increases in natural processes, but in their version they are more focused on information entropy. In their model, the information in the Universe stays the same or even becomes more ordered over time, rather than drifting into chaos.
Vopson’s gravity theory
This is not the only out there theory Vopson has come up with to support this belief, in earlier research, he also proposed that information itself might have mass, meaning that information could be treated as a form of matter. He even calculated the amount of information in the Universe by imagining that fundamental particles act like units of data although there is really no way to prove that his calculations are correct or that even the base theory has basis on reality.
According to him, these particles, which are the building blocks of everything, could be viewed as being like digital bits and could be arranged into a sort of pixel grid across space-time. Just like a computer bit can be a 1 or a 0, each pixel of space could either contain matter or not. In his latest paper, Vopson explains that gravity could be linked to how these matter-pixels are distributed
“This triggers the attracting force because of the rule set in the computational system, requiring the minimization of the information content, and by extension, a reduction of the computational power. […] Therefore, it appears that the gravitational attraction is just another optimizing mechanism in a computational process that has the role to compress information.” he explains.
Considering how little we actually understand about how gravity works, the concept is quite compelling and worth a second look. For something that is so integral to our way of life and needs as a species, we know surprisingly little about it and why it happens like it does, although like we have stated, there are plenty of theories.
In his paper, Vopson writes “Whether the Universe is indeed a computational construct remains an open question, but the entropic nature of gravity provides compelling evidence that information is a fundamental component of physical reality and data compression drives physical processes in the Universe.”
He suggests that future work should dig deeper into this idea, exploring how well it fits with both quantum and relativistic theories, and even look into possible experiments that might support it.