Probably head first!

The obvious future direction is to figure out how to get a relativistic model -- i.e., recover general relativity rather than just Newton's law. Can this be done? TBD...

In brief: the models have free parameters. In some regimes, the emergent gravitational interaction is indistinguishable from the usual picture involving gravitons. But in other regimes, the thermal fluctuations are large, and you can look for this in experiments.

The basic idea is like two pistons being pushed around by an ideal gas. In our model, the pistons are massive objects, and the gas is the collection of thermalized qubits/oscillators.

This is mostly a proof-of-concept construction, but the phenomenology is really interesting, and probably general.

To do this you have to make a detailed microscopic model. In ours, there's a bunch of qubits or oscillators, and the frequencies of these depend on where massive objects are. You can engineer this so that if the qubits are thermalized, this frequency dependent coupling gives a 1/r^2 force.

Jacobson and Verlinde famously suggested that gravity could come from some kind of thermal or "entropic" interaction. But their proposals were basically classical; they don't give enough details to figure out what happens when quantized matter couples to gravity.

Our goal was to figure this out.

People tell me that the technical discussion here is better than twitter these days. So let me try that out. Here's a sort of explainer on the paper:

Almost forgot to cross post 😅

I know. It's painful to me