Not all mass resides in black holes; neither does all information. But in detail, where does the curvature arise for smaller-than-black-hole objects, I don't know. But it seems more likely that this curvature can somehow be correlated with information than some abstract notion of "mass" or "energy". This backward Bekenstein (BB) argument starts making vacuum energy more interesting. So-called "flat space" would be necessarily uninteresting, because if there were something interesting going on, that information would already start curving the space. At 10:45 AM 7/25/2014, Eugene Salamin via math-fun wrote:

But then what is the source of Earth's gravity?

-- Gene

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________________________________ From: Henry Baker <hbaker1@pipeline.com> To: math-fun@mailman.xmission.com Sent: Friday, July 25, 2014 10:31 AM Subject: [math-fun] Backwards Bekenstein argument?

Bekenstein found that the entropy of a black hole was proportional to its surface area, which is also related to its mass.

Since Newton, we've always assumed that mass is the "source" of gravity, but perhaps we (and Newton) were misled in the pre-digital world.

Perhaps gravity (and particularly the space-time curvature) is really "caused" by the information stored on the Bekenstein surface, and the numerical value of the mass (& hence energy) is merely some statistic associated with this information.

Verlinde's ideas of a few years ago are in this direction; I'm not sure where his thinking has led him recently.