Queen Mary physicist ties gravity to entropy, and a separate team finds bacterial 'herds'

On 17 July 2026, researchers at Queen Mary University of London published a theoretical paper arguing that gravity is not a primordial force but a downstream consequence of the universe's tendency toward disorder. Three days earlier, on 15 July, a separate Queen Mary team reported that microscopic photosynthetic organisms form collective "herds" to fend off predators. The two findings share a building, an institutional appetite for big-picture questions, and little else, except for a shared willingness to stretch the conventional boundaries of their fields.

Taken together, the two papers offer a small case study in how a single mid-sized research university is positioning itself at the seam where physics, mathematics, and biology blur into one another. Neither claim is settled. Both have drawn measured interest from colleagues and a fair amount of online attention. The interesting question is not whether either paper is right, but what kind of science the two of them, side by side, represent.

The gravity proposal, in plain terms

The gravity paper, led by Professor Ginestra Bianconi, a mathematician at Queen Mary, sketches a mechanism by which the second law of thermodynamics, the rule that entropy, or disorder, tends to increase, could itself generate the gravitational pull that assembles galaxies, stars, and planets out of an otherwise uniform early universe. The argument is that the same statistical drive toward disorder that explains why ice melts and engines run also biases the cosmos toward clumping, because clumping is statistically the path of greatest entropy production.

Bianconi's framework is not the first to associate gravity with thermodynamics. That tradition runs back more than a century and includes the work of physicists such as Ludwig Boltzmann and, more recently, the Dutch theorist Erik Verlinde, whose 2010 essay "On the Origin of Gravity and the Laws of Newton" proposed that gravity is an emergent rather than a fundamental force. Bianconi's contribution, as described in the 17 July coverage, is to give that intuition a sharper mathematical handle and to tie it explicitly to the second law.

The claim is genuinely ambitious: it implies that geometry itself, the curvature of space that Einstein's general relativity treats as the substance of gravity, is a kind of bookkeeping for entropy. If the model holds up, it would reclassify one of the four known fundamental interactions as a statistical artefact, on par with temperature or pressure.

The bacteria that cluster like wildebeest

Three days before the gravity paper, a different Queen Mary group reported the other piece of news: tiny photosynthetic bacteria, when attacked by predatory microbes, will gather into dense groups that the researchers describe as "herds." The behaviour is visible under the microscope and produces a clear pattern, prey cells clustering at the centre, with predators largely excluded to the periphery. The team frames this as a defensive strategy analogous to the way large grazing mammals cluster in the open to dilute the risk of any individual being taken.

The relevance is not just biological. These particular bacteria are major drivers of the Earth's carbon cycle: they fix CO2, they feed other organisms at the base of marine food webs, and their population dynamics shape how much carbon moves between atmosphere, ocean, and sediment. A behaviour that changes how they survive predation is, by extension, a variable in the global climate system.

Why the same institution is producing both

There is a structural explanation for why Queen Mary keeps surfacing in stories of this kind. The university has built a mathematics department that openly courts the kind of cross-disciplinary work most physics departments treat as out of scope: network science, statistical mechanics, biological self-organisation, emergent phenomena. Bianconi is one of the names most associated with that posture; the bacterial-herd paper arrives from a more biology-flavoured wing of the same campus.

This is the same logic that drives cutting-edge AI labs, climate-modelling centres, and synthetic-biology start-ups: a small group can move faster when it shares vocabulary across fields that a larger bureaucracy would keep separated by department walls. The bigger question is whether the strategy scales, whether Queen Mary's bets on emergence, in physics and in biology, will mature into durable research programmes or stay as provocative one-off papers.

What remains open

Both papers have clear weak points, and neither team is hiding them. The gravity proposal is, for now, a theoretical structure: it does not yet yield a testable prediction that distinguishes it from general relativity in a region of parameter space where the two theories diverge. The bacterial work is at the opposite end of the spectrum: it is observational, the behaviour is striking, and the next job is to figure out which molecular mechanism triggers the clustering, chemical signalling, physical crowding, or something else entirely.

Sceptics will note that "emergent" explanations have a long history of sounding profound and yielding little in the way of experimental signatures. Defenders will point out that several of the assumptions baked into twentieth-century cosmology, from dark matter to cosmic inflation, started this way and have since hardened into working machinery. The honest position is that both readings have weight, and that the next eighteen months of peer-reviewed response will do more than any press release to settle where these ideas actually stand.

For now, the interesting fact is the institutional one: in the same fortnight, a London university has asked us to take seriously the idea that gravity is bookkeeping for entropy, and that bacteria graze in herds. The two papers are not the same kind of science, but they share a willingness to redraw the map between physics and biology. That posture, more than either result on its own, is what is worth watching.

This piece draws on Phys.org coverage dated 15 and 17 July 2026 of Queen Mary University of London research; the original Bianchi paper and the bacterial-herd study were the subject of separate institutional and trade-press accounts the same week.