In 2016, Erik Verlinde proposed a new theory of gravity called "emergent gravity" by using mathematical formulas used in the theory of elasticity. In 2017, De-Chang Dai and Dejan Stojkovic claimed to point out inconsistencies in Verlinde's emergent gravity. We point out that their claim was based on misunderstanding of the dictionary between emergent gravity and theory of elasticity. In addition, we propose a slightly different formula for Verlinde's emergent gravity.
A generally covariant version of Erik Verlinde's emergent gravity model is proposed. The Lagrangian constructed here allows an improved interpretation of the underlying mechanism. It suggests that de-Sitter space is filled with a vector-field that couples to baryonic matter and, by dragging on it, creates an effect similar to dark matter. We solve the covariant equation of motion in the background of a Schwarzschild space-time and obtain correction terms to the non-covariant expression. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the vector field can also mimic dark energy.
We point out that recent Verlinde's proposal of emergent gravity suffers from some internal inconsistencies. The main idea in this proposal is to preserve general relativity at short scales where numerous tests verified its validity, but modify it on large scales where we meet puzzles raised by observations (in particular dark matter), by using some entropic concepts. We first point out that gravity as a conservative force is very difficult (if possible at all) to portray as an entropic force. We then show that the derivation of the MOND relation using the elastic strain idea is not self-consi…
We study the effect of baryonic matter and apparent dark matter on black hole shadow in Verlinde's Emergent Gravity. To do so, we consider different baryonic mass profiles and an optically-thin disk region described by a gas in a radial free fall around the black hole. Assuming that most of the baryonic matter in the galaxy is located near the galactic center surrounding a supermassive black hole, we use two models of power law mass profile for the baryonic matter to study the effect of apparent dark matter on the shadow and the corresponding intensity. We find that the effect of the surroundi…
Following Chakrabarti,Chandrasekhar, and Naina [Physica A {\bf 389} (2010) 1571], we attempt a classical relativistic treatment of Verlinde's emergent entropic force conjecture by appealing to a relativistic Hamiltonian in the context of Tsalli's statistics. The ensuing partition function becomes the classical one for small velocities. We show that Tsallis' relativistic (classical) free particle distribution at temperature $T$ can generate Newton's gravitational force's $r^{-2}$ {\it distance's dependence}. If we want to repeat the concomitant argument by appealing to Renyi's distribution, the…
Following recent Verlinde's heuristic construction or emergent gravity, Hossenfelder wrote down the Lagrangian capturing some aspects of this theory. We point out that there is an error in calculations whose consequence is that a cosmological de Sitter space solution is not recovered from this Lagrangian. We correct this error in order to obtain the desired solution. We also show that small perturbations around de Sitter space grow, which implies that this state is not stable. However, the presence of matter and radiation might in principle provide stability.
We present the results from the analysis of galaxy rotation curves with Verlinde's emergent gravity. We use the data in the SPARC (Spitzer Photometry and Accurate Rotation Curves) database, which contains a sample of 175 nearby disk galaxies with 3.6 $μ$m surface photometry and rotation curves. We compute the gravitational acceleration at different galactocentric radii expected from the baryon distribution of the galaxies with the emergent gravity, and compare it with the observed gravitational acceleration derived from galactic rotation curves. The predicted and observed accelerations agree w…
We propose gravitational microlensing as a way of testing the emergent gravity theory recently proposed by Eric Verlinde~\cite{Verlinde:2016toy}. We consider two limiting cases: the dark mass of maximally anisotropic pressures (Case I) and of isotropic pressures (Case II). Our analysis of perihelion advancement of a planet shows that only Case I yields a viable theory. In this case the metric outside a star of mass $M_*$ can be modeled by that of a point-like global monopole whose mass is $M_*$ and a deficit angle $Δ= \sqrt{(2GH_0M_*)/(3c^3)}$, where $H_0$ is the Hubble rate and $G$ the Newton…
In this paper, we construct a class of charged and regular black hole solutions in Verlinde's Emergent Gravity (VEG). In particular, these solutions include, black holes with asymptotically Minkowski core, T-duality, Frolov/Simpson-Visser type solutions, as well as the Bardeen/Hayward type solutions as a special case. Using the relation between the apparent dark matter and the baryonic matter we find the effect of apparent dark matter on the spacetime geometry. We show that in general, the apparent dark matter leads to non-asymptotically flat spacetime geometry and, in the special limit of a p…
Verlinde (2016) has recently proposed that spacetime and gravity may emerge from an underlying microscopic theory. In a de Sitter spacetime, such emergent gravity (EG) contains an additional gravitational force due to dark energy, which may explain the mass discrepancies observed in galactic systems without the need of dark matter. For a point mass, EG is equivalent to Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND). We show that this equivalence does not hold for finite-size galaxies: there are significant differences between EG and MOND in the inner regions of galaxies. We confront theoretical prediction…
In the framework of the emergent gravity scenario by Verlinde, it was recently observed by Liu and Prokopec that, among other things, an anomalous pericenter precession would affect the orbital motion of a test particle orbiting an isolated central body. Here, it is shown that, if it were real, its expected magnitude for the inner planets of the Solar System would be at the same level of the present-day accuracy in constraining any possible deviations from their standard perihelion precessions as inferred from long data records spanning about the last century. The most favorable situation for …
In a recent paper, Erik Verlinde has developed the interesting possibility that spacetime and gravity may emerge from the entangled structure of an underlying microscopic theory. In this picture, dark matter arises as a response to the standard model of particle physics from the delocalized degrees of freedom that build up the dark energy component of the Universe. Dark matter physics is then regulated by a characteristic acceleration scale $a_0$, identified with the radius of the (quasi)-de Sitter universe we inhabit. For a point particle matter source, or outside an extended spherically symm…
We highlight phenomenological aspects of Verlinde's recent proposal to account for the mass anomalies in galactic systems without dark matter -- in particular in their relation to MOND. Welcome addition to the MOND lore as it is, this approach have reproduced, so far, only a small fraction of MOND phenomenology, and is still rather tentative, both in its theoretical foundations and in its phenomenology. What Verlinde has extracted from this approach, so far, is a formula -- of rather limited applicability, and with no road to generalization in sight -- for the effective gravitational field of …
In a recent publication in this journal, Erik Verlinde attempts to show that gravity should be viewed not as a fundamental force, but rather as an emergent thermodynamic phenomenon arising from an unspecified microscopic theory via equipartition and holography. This paper presents a challenge to his reformulation of gravity. A detailed examination of Verlinde's derivation leads to a number of questions that severely weaken the claim that such a theory correctly reproduces Newton's laws or Einstein gravity. In particular, we find that neither Newtonian gravity nor the Einstein equations are uni…
In this paper I develop a framework for relating dualities and emergence: two notions that are close to each other but also exclude one another. I adopt the conception of duality as 'isomorphism', cashing it out in terms of three conditions. These three conditions prompt two conceptually different ways in which a duality can be modified to make room for emergence; and I argue that this exhausts the possibilities for combining dualities and emergence (via coarse-graining). I apply this framework to gauge/gravity dualities, considering in detail three examples: AdS/CFT, Verlinde's scheme, and bl…
This paper is a set of notes that we wrote concerning the first version of Emergent Gravity [gr-qc/0602022]. It is our version of an exercise that we proposed to some of our students. The idea was to find mathematical errors and inconsistencies on some recent articles published in scientific journals and in the arXiv, and we did.
The accelerated expansion of the universe can be interpreted as a quest for satisfying holographic equipartition. It can be expressed by a simple law, $ΔV = Δt\left(N_{surf}- N_{bulk}\right)$ which leads to the standard Friedmann equation. This novel idea suggested by Padmanabhan in the context of general relativity has been generalized by Cai and Yang et al. to Gauss-Bonnet and Lovelock gravities for a spatially flat universe in different methods. We investigate the consistency of these generalizations with the constraints imposed by the maximum entropy principle. Interestingly, both these ge…
Modified Newtonian Dynamics has one free parameter and requires an interpolation function to recover the normal Newtonian limit. We here show that this interpolation function is unnecessary in a recently proposed covariant completion of Erik Verlinde's emergent gravity, and that Verlinde's approach moreover fixes the function's one free parameter. The so-derived correlation between the observed acceleration (inferred from rotation curves) and the gravitational acceleration due to merely the baryonic matter fits well with data. We then argue that the redshift-dependence of galactic rotation cur…
We present the radial distribution of the dark matter in two massive, X-ray luminous galaxy clusters, Abell~2142 and Abell~2319, and compare it with the quantity predicted as apparent manifestation of the baryonic mass in the context of the "Emergent Gravity" scenario, recently suggested from Verlinde (2016). Thanks to the observational strategy of the \xmm\ Cluster Outskirt Programme (X-COP), using the X-ray emission mapped with \xmm\ and the SZ signal in the Planck survey, we recover the gas density, temperature and thermal pressure profiles up to $\sim R_{200}$, allowing to constrain at unp…
Verlinde (2016) has proposed a new modified theory of gravity, Emergent Gravity (EG), as an alternative to dark matter. EG reproduces the Tully-Fisher relationship with no free parameters and agrees with the velocity curves of most massive, spiral galaxies well. In its current form, the theory only applies to isolated, spherically symmetric systems in a dark energy-dominated Universe, and thus can only be tested fairly with such systems. This paper presents a framework for rotation curve tests of EG using isolated dwarf galaxies. Here I extend the EG equations to axisymmetric distributions for…
Verlinde's theory of Emergent Gravity (EG) describes gravity as an emergent phenomenon rather than a fundamental force. Applying this reasoning in de Sitter space leads to gravity behaving differently on galaxy and galaxy cluster scales; this excess gravity might offer an alternative to dark matter. Here we test these ideas using the data from the Coma cluster and from 58 stacked galaxy clusters. The X-ray surface brightness measurements of the clusters at $0.1 < z < 1.2$ along with the weak lensing data are used to test the theory. We find that the simultaneous EG fits of the X-ray and weak l…
Recently Verlinde proposed that gravity can be described as an emergent phenomena arising from changes in the information associated with the positions of material bodies. By using noncommutative geometry as a way to describe the microscopic, microstructure of quantum spacetime, we derive modified Friedmann equation in this setup and study the entropic force modifications to the inflationary dynamics of early universe.
We clarify the problem in which occasions can gravitational force be regarded emergent from thermodynamics, by proposing an entropic mechanism that can extract the entropic gradient existing in spacetime, due to the variation of the Casini-Bekenstein bound in specific quasi-static processes with the heat flux $δQ$ into the whole casual wedge. We explicitly formulate the derivation of inertial force as the emergent gravitational attraction from the Entanglement First Law. We find the saturation of the bound along with the vanishing relative entropy corresponds to the variation of minimal surfac…
We consider the controversial hypothesis that gravity is an entropic force that has its origin in the thermodynamics of holographic screens. Several key aspects of entropic gravity are discussed. In particular, we revisit and elaborate on our criticism of the recent claim that entropic gravity fails to explain observations involving gravitationally-bound quantum states of neutrons in the GRANIT experiment and gravitationally induced quantum interference. We argue that the analysis leading to this claim is troubled by a misinterpretation concerning the relation between the microstates of a holo…
'Holographic' relations between theories have become an important theme in quantum gravity research. These relations entail that a theory without gravity is equivalent to a gravitational theory with an extra spatial dimension. The idea of holography was first proposed in 1993 by Gerard 't Hooft on the basis of his studies of evaporating black holes. Soon afterwards the holographic 'AdS/CFT' duality was introduced, which since has been intensively studied in the string theory community and beyond. Recently, Erik Verlinde has proposed that even Newton's law of gravitation can be related holograp…
