Ginestra Bianconi: The Physicist Who (Unexpectedly) Derived Gravity From Entropy

Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal

Curt Jaimungal

Society & Culture, Physics, Science, Philosophy

4.6 • 616 Ratings

🗓️ 13 July 2026

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | Apple Podcasts | RSS

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Summary

I personally subscribe to The Economist. TOE listeners get 35% off the annual subscription. No other podcast has this! https://economist.com/TOE Ginestra Bianconi thinks gravity can be derived from entropy — and that gravity itself is fundamentally anti-reductionistic, since it's about geometry rather than isolated particle interactions. In this episode, the network-topologist-turned-gravity-theorist explains her "Gravity from Entropy" action, which treats matter and geometry symmetrically through a geometric quantum relative entropy (not the horizon entropy of Verlinde or Jacobson). She details why it reduces to Einstein's equations at low energy while predicting a dynamical, always-positive dark energy term (the "G field"), how it may avoid black hole singularities and reproduce the area law without invoking holography, and why she believes understanding the brain may be harder than understanding quantum gravity. We close with her advice for young researchers. I hope you enjoy. TIMESTAMPS: - 00:00 - Information Content of Geometry - 07:38 - Geometric Quantum Relative Entropy - 15:58 - Geometrizing the Matter Field - 23:45 - Emergent Dark Energy - 30:12 - Statistical Mechanics vs Thermodynamics - 37:59 - Structure and Dynamics Interplay - 45:20 - Holography and Area Law - 51:23 - Interdisciplinary Research Vision LINKS MENTIONED: Ginestra's Webpage: https://webspace.maths.qmul.ac.uk/g.bianconi/ Ginestra's Papers: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ycQXwWgAAAAJ Gravity from Entropy [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.14391 Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/0393319911?tag=toe08-20 The Thermodynamics of the Gravity from Entropy Theory [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.22545 Notes on Some Entanglement Properties of Quantum Field Theory [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.04993 Inflation from Entropy [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.23987 Thermodynamics of Spacetime: The Einstein Equation of State [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/9504004 More Is Different [Paper]: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.177.4047.393 Information, Physics, Quantum [Paper]: https://philpapers.org/archive/WHEIPQ.pdf Network Geometry with Flavor [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1511.04539 Black Holes and Entropy [Paper]: https://physicsgg.me/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/black-holes-and-entropy_bekenstein.pdf Ginestra's Lecture on Higher-Order Networks: https://youtu.be/o4TWDTgqQKY Elan Barenholtz [TOE]: https://youtu.be/A36OumnSrWY Frederic Schuller [TOE]: https://youtu.be/Bnh-UNrxYZg Erik Verlinde [TOE]: https://youtu.be/ilVImMHcr_g Ted Jacobson [TOE]: https://youtu.be/3mhctWlXyV8 Karl Friston [TOE]: https://youtu.be/2v7LBABwZKA Subir Sarkar [TOE]: https://youtu.be/epkuoytFJWA Stephen Wolfram [TOE]: https://youtu.be/FkYer0xP37E Roman Yampolskiy [TOE]: https://youtu.be/TgFmA-Qwsek Eva Miranda [TOE]: https://youtu.be/6XyMepn-AZo Cumrun Vafa [TOE]: https://youtu.be/kUHOoMX4Bqw Neil Turok [TOE]: https://youtu.be/zNZCa1pVE20 David Kaiser [TOE]: https://youtu.be/_yebLXsIdwo Ivette Fuentes [TOE]: https://youtu.be/YWbjI-QsH2E Philip Mannheim [TOE]: https://youtu.be/rNXNHYvS7zU FOLLOW: - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b92xAErofYQA7bU4e - Substack: https://curtjaimungal.substack.com/subscribe - Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt - Discord Invite: https://discord.com/invite/kBcnfNVwqs - Crypto: https://nowpayments.io/donation/TOE - PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/donate?hosted_button_id=XUBHNMFXUX5S4 Guests do not pay to appear. #science Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Gravity from entropy is a new theory that quantify the information content of the universe.
0:07.0	It somehow challenged the reductionist approach.
0:12.0	This is Genestra Bianconi, Professor of Applied Mathematics at Queen Mary University of London,
0:19.0	an architect of modern network science. Over the past few years,
0:23.1	she went into the continuum despite coming from the discrete sector and published the radical
0:28.4	paper, Gravity from Entropy. On this channel, I. Kirchai Mungle, interview researchers
0:34.2	regarding their theories of reality with rigor and technical depth.
0:38.1	Today, Beyond Coni's case, that gravity can be derived from entropy,
0:42.5	how dark energy emerges from her equations on its own, always positive, not anti-decider,
0:48.3	and we close with the advice she gives her PhD students.
0:51.4	The what keeps me awake at night is the second quantization of this theory.
0:56.2	Maybe there is no single static solution of the black holding gravity from entropy,
1:01.7	and maybe this singularity is avoided.
1:05.8	What is gravity?
1:08.2	Well, I think we know that gravity is a fundamental force, and we know this since
1:14.2	neutron, but it's a particular fundamental force because it's somehow, from my perspective,
1:22.4	challenge the reductionist approach, because it is about geometry, and this is what we learn from Einstein,
1:31.9	and geometry is what allow all the other fundamental force to occur in nature.
1:38.6	So somehow, I think that gravity is about geometry and how geometry interacts with matter fields.
1:48.0	And this is a general question.
1:50.3	I mean, for my perspective, this question goes also behind gravity itself,
1:57.2	because it is a problem of the interplane between,
	...

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