For centuries, gravity has been considered one of nature’s fundamental forces, underpinning everything from falling apples to orbiting planets. But a radical new theory suggests it may not be a force at all, but rather a byproduct of something deeper and more fundamental: information processing. In a paper recently published in AIP Advances, the theory proposes that gravity emerges from an underlying informational law, named the “second law of infodynamics”, which governs how information organises itself throughout the universe.
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This idea draws heavily from information theory – the mathematical study of data storage, structure, and communication – originally developed by Claude Shannon. Within digital systems, information is constantly compressed to optimise memory and processing power. It’s possible the universe is doing something similar, operating like a vast computational simulation. In this view, gravity is not an attractive force but a natural consequence of the universe striving to reduce its informational entropy, or disorder, by pulling matter into more compact and efficient configurations.
To illustrate, imagine a hot cup of coffee cooling in a room. As the temperature evens out, physical entropy increases – the system becomes more disordered in thermodynamic terms. Yet, informational entropy, which considers the variety in molecular energy levels, decreases because more particles behave similarly. Applying this to space, when particles are randomly scattered, tracking them takes a great deal of information. But when they clump together under what we call “gravity”, the system’s information becomes more structured and easier to manage.
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The theory goes even further, suggesting space is not a smooth continuum but a grid of discrete information cells – like pixels on a screen. These cells store data on the universe’s contents, and the overall system seeks efficiency by simplifying complexity. When tested mathematically, this tendency towards lower information entropy generates a force that mirrors Newton’s law of gravity. If true, gravity could be a natural output of the universe’s computational rules – a law not imposed from above, but emerging from the fundamental drive towards informational efficiency.
