When Gravity Emerges from Information

The scientific article “Gravity from Information: An Equation of State for Spacetime Curvature” by Dr. Elias Rubenstein takes a radical perspective on one of the oldest forces of nature: gravity. Instead of treating gravity as a fundamental attraction between masses, the work asks: What if gravity is simply what we see when an underlying medium of information bends and rearranges itself? In this view, spacetime curvature is not postulated, but arises as a visible imprint of how information is organised in the universe.

At the heart of the framework is an informational medium that describes, at every point in spacetime, how much information is present, how it flows, and how far the actual state of the universe is from a special equilibrium reference state. The same formalism already used in earlier papers to describe the arrow of time and the emergence of space is now applied directly to gravity. From this informational description, the paper derives an additional contribution to the usual energy–momentum tensor of matter: an informational stress–energy tensor. This new term behaves mathematically like an extra source of gravity. When the informational medium is smooth and close to equilibrium, its effect reduces to a constant and one recovers Einstein’s general relativity exactly. When the informational structure becomes inhomogeneous, the extra term produces genuine corrections to gravity that cannot be mimicked by ordinary matter or a simple cosmological constant.

On cosmological scales, these informational corrections act like a controlled “dark” component. They are described by a small, time-dependent fraction of the critical energy density of the universe and are directly linked to two informational quantities: a conductivity that measures how strongly the initial and final boundary conditions of the universe are connected, and a measure of how far the actual state is from the equilibrium reference state. This makes it possible to describe, within one coherent framework, universes that look almost exactly like our standard ΛCDM model, but also scenarios in which an initially expanding universe later slows down and recollapses. In such models, the ultimate fate of the universe is not set by arbitrary initial conditions, but by global informational constraints that tie together beginning and end.

The same idea also sheds new light on black holes and strong gravity. In the informational picture, a black hole is not just an object with a singular point of infinite curvature. Instead, it can be seen as a highly folded, extremely dense configuration of the informational medium itself. Far away, the geometry is practically indistinguishable from the familiar Schwarzschild or Kerr solutions of general relativity, so all standard tests of gravity remain intact. Deep inside, however, the informational contribution can become dominant and potentially replace the classical singularity by a finite “informational core”. This suggests new ways to think about the interior of black holes without conflicting with what we already know from observations.

Importantly, the paper does not stop at an abstract interpretation. It formulates the informational contribution in a form that can be directly implemented in cosmological and numerical relativity codes. The informational dark component is expressed through simple parameters that can be constrained by observations of supernovae, large-scale structure and the cosmic microwave background. At the same time, the strong-field sector offers potential signatures in gravitational-wave signals and horizon-scale black hole images. In this way, the work turns the slogan “gravity from information” into a concrete, testable framework.

The relevance of this article lies in the new angle from which it approaches the question “What is gravity?”. Rather than adding yet another free dark component by hand, it proposes that gravity itself is the macroscopic equation of state of an underlying informational medium. Spacetime curvature, dark energy–like behaviour and the global fate of the universe all emerge from how this medium deviates from equilibrium and how strongly the beginning and the end of the cosmos are tied together by information.

You can find the full scientific article at:

Elias Rubenstein (2025): Gravity from Information: An Equation of State for Spacetime Curvature
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17586534