Unless you've been bunkered down in a hole without an internet connection, you've probably heard that Apple has announced its latest revolutionary product, the iPad tablet.

Personally, I think this product is indeed revolutionary and that many businesses would quickly adopt the iPad. The key reason isn't the iPad itself. Its because Apple re-wrote their iWork productivity suite to work on the iPad. iPad and iWork together makes a very compelling combination for businesses who have lots of traveling white collar workforce.

I can see lots of salesmen giving slick presentations using iWork's Keynote app with just a flick of their finger. Likewise, insurance agents will be easily filling in customer data using Number's data form on the iPad. Such businesses will be buying hundreds if not thousands of iPads. Needless to say, I think Apple has created another hot product that will be flying off the shelves.

Hurray for Apple, but that is not the point of this blog post. The reason is that I see the future of computers in the iPad. More specifically, the future of how we interact with computers. Apple has taken the simplified user interface developed for the iPhone and shown that it can not only works on a much bigger screen, but also showed that it enhances applications by making them much easier to use than conventional window-based applications. This can clearly be seen in the re-written iPad iWork suite, which is much easier to use and is still able to incorporate a lot of the same functionality contained in the full fledged Mac OS X iWork suite.

Apple has brought the old WYSIWYG paradigm to a whole new level of simplicity.

I foresee the end of applications being housed in resizable windows. Instead, applications will now fill the entire screen. You will directly touch and alter things on the screen with your fingers instead of having to plow through multiple levels of menu bars. Indeed, the simplicity over complexity and rich features that few people use would be the key to future applications.

I would not be surprised if Apple brought not only touch sensitive screens, but also this new user interface to their Macbooks and their Mac software in the near future.

A recently published paper on arXiv has caused a slight commotion within the Physics community. Let me first say that Physicists have to do a lot more in-depth study to confirm this, but we could potentially be seeing Gravity from a totally new perspective.

Let me take a step back and give a brief overview of our current understanding of Gravity - Einsten's Theory of General Relativity. General Relativity is incredibly accurate and it tells us that space-time is warped by the attraction of masses. This warping of space-time is what we call Gravity. While Einstein's theory is incredibly accurate in calculating the degree of warping, it does not explain why the warping of space-time occurs in the first place.

All that has changed with this paper, which if I understand correctly, suggests that what we know as Gravity is really the physical manifestation of Entropy in the universe. Entropy tells us that everything in the universe goes from an high energy state to a lower energy state. Iron rusts, fuel gets burnt, cars slow down due to friction, suns burn out. The whole universe is slowly descending into chaotic randomness.

Another way to look at Entropy is through Shannon's Information Theory, which allow Computer Scientists and Electronics Engineers to calculate the absolute minimum amount of data (bits) that needs to be transmitted in order to overcome Entropy. That's right, everything in Information Theory is measured in Entropy.

This brings us back to the arXiv paper. If I understood it correctly, it is saying that in order for Entropy to work in the universe, the universe needs to "transmit" the mass information of every object to every other object. And Information Theory allows us to calculate the minimum amount of bits required in this "transmission". The author of this paper did this derivation and discovered that the minimum amount of data resolves to a short formula, and that formula is exactly Newton's law of Gravity. The author has not had time to take relativity into consideration in his derivation, but it is anticipated that the solution would indeed be Einstein's Theory of General Relativity.

I'm probably not explaining it clearly, but if you're interested in knowing more please visit The Hammock Physicist's blog on the paper.