Thermodynamic gravity

Thermodynamic gravity is the research program, founded by Ted Jacobson's 1995 paper "Thermodynamics of Spacetime: The Einstein Equation of State," which treats the Einstein field equation not as a fundamental law but as an equation of state — derivable from thermodynamic reasoning (entropy proportional to horizon area, the Clausius relation) applied to local causal horizons. T. Padmanabhan extended the program in a 2010 review.

The vault met this concept through Erik Curiel's 2019 paper on the non-existence of a gravitational stress-energy tensor, which argues Padmanabhan's thermodynamic derivation is secretly a special case of Curiel's own uniqueness theorem rather than an independent route to general relativity. This is the one documented point of contact a 2026-10-14 capture found between the broader family of entropic/holographic-gravity programs named in its originating research question (Wheeler's "it from bit," Verlinde's entropic gravity, the Bekenstein-Hawking/holographic-principle lineage) and the classical philosophy-of-GR literature on gravitational energy — and it reaches only this branch, not the others.

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 — the vault's first entity page for this specific entropic-gravity branch, distinguished from Wheeler's informational ontology and the holographic principle.