Gravity has always seemed mysterious. Newton described it as an invisible force pulling objects together, while Einstein revealed it as the bending of spacetime itself. More recently, physicists noticed that gravity has deep connections to heat and entropy — especially around black holes — hinting that it might also be a thermodynamic effect. These ideas all work, but until now they have felt like different languages describing different parts of the same phenomenon.
The Bit Conservation and Balance (BCB) principle brings these perspectives together with one simple insight: differences cannot be created or destroyed — they can only move. In physics, “differences” means distinguishability: the ability to tell one physical state from another. Matter produces enormous amounts of distinguishability through its internal quantum activity, creating an “informational landscape” around it. When you write the equations governing how this distinguishability must flow, they naturally turn into Newton’s law of gravity. And when you add the fact that information can’t travel faster than light, the familiar structure of spacetime — light cones, causality, and even curvature — emerges automatically.
The most striking part is what happens when you look at horizons, such as the edge of a black hole or the boundary seen by an accelerating observer. These horizons trap and accumulate distinguishability. When you combine this with standard thermodynamics, the flow of information across a horizon reproduces Einstein’s equations exactly. The message is profound: gravity is neither purely geometric nor purely thermodynamic — it’s both, because it is fundamentally about the flow of information. Spacetime, curvature, and gravity all arise from a single, elegant principle: the universe must conserve distinguishability.