Current project – Star Formation
The formation of a star is the result of a carefully orchestrated competition among five major vector forces, each dominant in a different spatial regime and at a different evolutionary stage. Gravity is the universal driver, but it cannot act alone: without centrifugal support to form a disk, without gas drag to allow solids to drift and grow, without thermal pressure to set initial conditions and eventually halt collapse, and without magnetic fields to transport the angular momentum that would otherwise prevent collapse entirely, the molecular cloud gas would remain inert or fragment in ways inconsistent with observed stellar populations.
The magnetic force is arguably the least intuitive yet most consequential of the five. Through the interplay of ambipolar diffusion, Ohmic dissipation, the Hall effect, and the magnetocentrifugal jet mechanism, magnetic fields regulate the rate, efficiency, and angular momentum budget of star formation across all scales from ~100 AU cloud cores down to the sub-AU jet-launching regions. Future observations with ALMA, JWST, and the next-generation VLA will continue to constrain these mechanisms through resolved disk kinematics, jet proper motions, and magnetic field polarimetry.
Relative importance of each force during the five main stages of star formation, from the initial molecular cloud core through the pre-main-sequence phase. Magnetic forces peak during the Class 0 protostar stage, when field-envelope coupling is strongest; thermal/radiation pressure rises steadily as the star contracts and luminosity increases
Current Project – Entropic Forces as Emergent Gravity
Throughout antiquity, people were concerned about the force of gravity, because it was a mysterious “action at a distance”. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, described gravity as part of the “divine authority” and that natural explanations were spiritually dangerous by dismissing the role of supernatural forces in the world (his Journal, 1763). And yet, gravity remains a mystery in many ways.
In early 2026, the concept of Gravity is widely studied but is still resistant to the goal of creating a unified theory that brings it into the quantum fold. Carney et al. (2025) in a recent article in Physical Review, postulates a causal relationship between entropy and gravity as a completely novel approach to how gravity is conceived and operates in the quantum realm. This paper (in-process) is an exploration of that work, specifically modeling a 3-d stochastic representation of quanta entropy and alignment preceding gravity formation in space-time.
No experiment has yet directly confirmed that gravity is quantized. All observations to date are consistent with classical general relativity. The best near-term expectations lie in the Bose–Marletto–Vedral tabletop entanglement proposal and in increasingly sensitive pulsar timing arrays and gravitational wave detectors. The search for the graviton—gravity’s quantum particle—remains one of the greatest open challenges in physics.
About thirty years ago, physicists conjectured that gravity might not be a fundamental force at all, but could instead emerge from the way information is rearranged — an idea called “entropic gravity.” Carney and colleagues took this historical conjecture and, for the first time, built actual working quantum mechanical models to show how it could function in detail.
An entropic model is a framework in which a force — rather than being carried by a dedicated fundamental particle, emerges from the statistical tendency of a large system to maximize its entropy (disorder).
While many forces in nature are mediated by the exchange of virtual field quanta (such as photons carrying the electromagnetic force), there are also effective forces which arise from complex systems driving thermodynamic free energies to their extrema. Entropic gravity proposes that gravity is one such force — a thermal or entropic interaction rather than the result of a fundamental quantum field.
In Carney’s (2025) specific models, space is populated by a background of quantum mediators (qubits or oscillators). In the local model, space is filled with a lattice of qubits, one per site. A nearby mass causes the qubits to slightly polarize relative to their background state. As two masses approach each other, the overall polarized volume decreases and entropy increases — and it is this entropic pressure that produces an attractive gravitational force following an inverse-square law.
In this formulation, Newton’s law of gravity is shown to arise from a process called “extremization of the free energy” of a collection of quantum bits (qubits) or oscillators, rather than from the exchange of gravitons or any other fundamental particle.
My research follows Carney, et.al. and simulates various configurations of the “local” model that excludes quantum entanglement as a causal factor. The preliminary information below results from my computational simulations of a 100,000 quanta field, mediated by two large masses. It is based on a three dimensional ISING model with numerous modifications.
Initial Simulation Results (provisionary)
Citations and References
More information is available by request. Also see this link about References
Please contact me here: william25@nxtlight.com
