In 2010 Erik Verlinde published a paper arguing that gravity is an emergent force. It arises from entropy, that is, from how information is distributed across surfaces, or holographic screens, as he put it.
It was a quiet bomb. If Verlinde is right, three of the four fundamental forces remain. The fourth, the one that holds the solar system together and makes apples fall, turns out to be thermodynamics: it follows from the way information is redistributed.
I thought of it again in 2020, when Vitaly Vanchurin's paper came out (arXiv, 2020; the follow-up with Katsnelson and Koonin appeared in PNAS in 2022). His claim goes further: the universe is a neural network, and from the formalism, in the right limits, you can derive quantum mechanics (fast learning) and gravity (slow learning).
Two independent papers, ten years apart, say the same thing in different words.
What links these ideas
If gravity is the way the universe processes information, and the universe is a neural network, then gravity is the connection architecture of that network. That is what the picture looks like when both premises are taken seriously.
A node here is a point of computation, and stars and galaxies are how such nodes appear to us. The edges between nodes carry bandwidth and information flow, and what we feel as weight is a gradient in the density of those connections.
It sounds like metaphysics, I know. But both Verlinde and Vanchurin have equations behind the picture, and from those equations come the same laws physicists have been calibrating against observation for a hundred years.
Where the speculation sits
I do not consider this proven, though I would call it consistent: two different teams arrived independently at structurally the same picture, in which matter, gravity and quantum behaviour are the upper floors and information dynamics is the foundation.
In my own preprint, Pointer Architecture, I go one level down: I build a discrete substrate in which information, commits and observers are primary, and check what it can reproduce. On a de Sitter horizon, a holographic construction on that substrate reproduces the standard estimate of dark energy to within a factor of about 0.73, a known result restated in the language of the substrate. That is a long way from proof; it is an instrument for testing, with falsifiers written down in advance.
Why it matters
If the fourth force turns out to be thermodynamics, the whole question of what binds objects in the universe stops being mechanical and becomes informational. The consequence is technical: alongside masses and distances, the equations take in entropy, entanglement and information capacity.
Dark matter could then turn out to be a missing connection, a part of the architecture we have been looking for as mass, because nobody expected information there.
We do not have a complete theory yet. What we have is a crack in a wall behind which, possibly, stands a different building.