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Comment by workingsmart | Hacker News Reader

I would like to respectfully say that this article is only superficially appealing and therefore not proper for HN. This is just a hypothesis without mathematical basis. All you really need to read is the last few paragraphs to see that there isn't any mathematical rigor to it. This is a whole article about speculation about gravity, and it wastes a lot of time trying to hype up a physicist that won't flush out his math.

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Since when does HN need mathematical rigor for hypotheses? I have never seen this standard applied to blog posts about how to be a leader, pitching your ideas, how to program, etc. All of which usually don't come with the statistical proof with which they should come if they want to make a scientific claim... It's all just insights and thoughts.

I haven't had a chance to go through the paper yet (http://arxiv.org/abs/1001.0785), but it seems that he does make some derivations and proof sketches. Can someone verify this?

I got through page 11 before loosing the plot, and it seems to be a very light mathematical treatment of the subject. More of a "what if we thought about it this way?" then a "here's the proof" type paper.

Relativity started with "what if we thought about it this way?". Just saying.

Yeah part of the process, because of this new paper someone might get an idea they wouldn't have had to expand upon it.

You see articles stating that something broke the laws of physics when really it just didn't fit our current model of understanding.

  > You see articles stating that something broke the
  > laws of physics when really it just didn't fit our
  > current model of understanding.

It 'broke the law' in so much as it proved that the law was a 'broken' law (aka incomplete). It wasn't an action that violated a law, but a law that was rendered 'broken' by an action.

Yes, exactly. That's why it's worth talking about in the first place.

I wasn't downplaying the paper, just observing what I could about the current strength of its claims. It's more of a Gedankenexperiment with some guiding equations, which it seems the author stated as his intent in the nytimes article.

I'm not a physics major, but it appears superficial, non conclusive and light on math. At this point it's not a theory, but an (interesting as it may be) speculation.

This paper built upon work that Stephen Hawking did.

"The hypothesis of gravity being an entropic force has a history that goes back to research on black hole thermodynamics by Bekenstein and Hawking in the mid-1970s. These studies suggest a deep connection between gravity and thermodynamics." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_as_an_entropic_force

someone might be able to find a better source.

In order for anyone to take your opinion about what is proper for HN seriously you need to post it from an account that actually has an investment in HN.

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