Abstract

This literature review explores the radical paradigm of emergent gravity, which posits that gravitational interaction is not a fundamental force, but a statistical phenomenon arising from quantum information and the thermodynamics of spacetime. We establish that this approach interprets general relativity as a macroscopic, effective theory—analogous to classical thermodynamics—derived from the coarse-grained behavior of microscopic informational constituents.

The central theoretical divergence lies in the predicted dynamics of quantum objects: while standard perturbative quantum gravity predicts coherent, unitary evolution mediated by hypothetical gravitons, entropic models describe the interaction as an open quantum system featuring intrinsic Lindbladian noise terms. This non-unitary evolution is the defining mechanistic signature of emergent gravity.

We analyze the profound implications of this framework, including the natural incorporation of the holographic principle, which links spacetime geometry directly to quantum entanglement entropy, and the theoretical capacity to account for Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) as an entropic scaling effect in the weak-field regime.

The highest-value contribution for researchers is the delineation of experimentally falsifiable predictions. These include the necessity of detecting a characteristic gravitational force noise spectrum, the search for decoherence and dissipative effects within high-precision tabletop experiments like atom interferometry, and the critical test of whether the gravitational interaction can coherently generate quantum entanglement. These signatures provide the definitive means to distinguish between a fundamental, coherent quantum gravity and a thermodynamic, emergent gravitational reality.