1. Erik Verlinde is the identical twin brother of physicist Herman Verlinde.
11 Facts About Erik Verlinde
1. 2.
Erik Verlinde was born in the Dutch village of Woudenberg on 21 January 1962, together with his identical twin brother, Herman Verlinde.
3.
Erik Verlinde went to school in the nearby city of Utrecht, where he graduated from the gymnasium in 1980.
4.
Erik Verlinde wrote his Master's thesis with Nobel laureate Gerard 't Hooft.
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In 1985, Erik Verlinde started work on his PhD at Utrecht University under the formal supervision of Bernard de Wit.
6.
Erik Verlinde worked again with Herman and Dijkgraaf, and in practice the trio supervised themselves.
7.
In September 1988 Erik defended his PhD thesis, which included the Verlinde formula.
8.
In 2000, Erik Verlinde extended Cardy's result to conformal field theories of arbitrary dimension, allowing the calculation of entropy of black holes in any dimension.
9.
In 2009, Erik Verlinde showed that the laws of gravity may be derived by assuming a form of the holographic principle and the laws of thermodynamics.
10.
On 8 November 2016 Erik Verlinde published his new theory of gravity, where gravity is not one of the four fundamental forces of physics but, rather, gravity is emergent from other fundamental forces.
11.
Erik Verlinde further argues that this entropy modifies emergent gravity, introducing residual forces when the acceleration due to gravity is very weak.