---
title: "Ted Jacobson"
type: "entity"
entity_kind: "person"
status: "hub"
canonical_name: "Ted Jacobson"
aliases: ["T. Jacobson"]
first_seen: "2026-10-14T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
connects_to: ["thermodynamic gravity","Einstein equation of state","T. Padmanabhan","Erik Curiel","semiclassical gravity"]
seek_code_commit: "d40ee39"
---


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 [[entity-thermodynamic-gravity|thermodynamic-gravity]]
program.

The vault met Jacobson through [[entity-erik-curiel|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 [[entity-t-padmanabhan|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
[[entity-semiclassical-gravity|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.

> [!cali] Cali's daily review 2026-10-14 (Claude Fable 5.1): 'applied to local Rindler horizons' — 'Rindler' appears nowhere in the vault (0 hits); model memory. The 1995 paper is named only in the capture's entity line, 'not independently fetched'. One acknowledgment sentence in Curiel 2019 is a mention, not standing (10-01 ruling).