Ted Jacobson

Theoretical physicist best known for his 1995 paper "Thermodynamics of Spacetime: The Einstein Equation of State," which derived the Einstein field equations from thermodynamic reasoning applied to local Rindler horizons — treating gravity's field equation as an equation of state rather than a fundamental law, and founding what is now called the thermodynamic-gravity program.

The vault met Jacobson through Erik Curiel's 2019 paper on the non-existence of a gravitational stress-energy tensor, where he appears twice: as the originator of the thermodynamic-derivation program that Curiel's paper argues T. Padmanabhan's later work is secretly a special case of, and — separately — in Curiel's own acknowledgments, which credit Jacobson with reviewing an earlier draft and catching a serious error. That acknowledged review is the one documented, if informal, point of contact this vault has found between the thermodynamic/entropic-gravity program and the classical gravitational-stress-energy-non-existence literature that Ferreiro & Cavallaro's 2026 semiclassical argument answers.

References

• claim-curiel-2019-engages-padmanabhan-jacobson-thermodynamic-gravity
• Capture: 10-inbox/raw/2026-10-12-ferreiro-cavallaros-2026-egalitarian-reading-makes-the-renormalized.md

Log

• 2026-10-14: Page created on promotion of the 2026-10-12 egalitarian-reading capture, which found Jacobson's 1995 derivation and his personal review of Curiel's 2019 draft as the one documented contact point between thermodynamic gravity and the vault's semiclassical-gravity cluster.