A mathematician at Queen Mary University of London has developed a framework called Gravity from Entropy that may reconcile the universe's increasing total entropy with the emergence of complex structures such as galaxies, stars and life.
Professor Ginestra Bianconi led the study, published in Physical Review D in 2026. Her analysis shows that while the universe's overall entropy rises with cosmic expansion, entropy per unit volume declines. This pattern could permit local order to form without violating the second law of thermodynamics.
The work builds on connections between gravity and thermodynamics first explored by Jacob Bekenstein and Stephen Hawking in the 1970s. Bianconi's approach uses statistical mechanics to describe gravity emerging from informational properties of spacetime, expressed through the Quantum Geometric Relative Entropy between two metrics.
At low energies the equations recover general relativity, yet at stronger curvatures they produce a dynamic dark energy term. The study examines these effects in Friedmann-Robertson-Walker spacetimes and finds that local geometric components follow a version of the first law of thermodynamics.
"This work reveals how the Gravity from Entropy theory can tackle the challenging question to reconcile the second principle of thermodynamics with the emergence of complexity in our Universe," Bianconi said.