Speaker
Description
This presentation investigates the semantic evolution of the concept of “entropic force” and its use across physics, biology, and soft-matter research. By analysing scientific articles downloaded from arXiv, we aim to reconstruct how this notion circulated between different research fields since the late twentieth century and how interdisciplinary exchanges contributed to its transformation over time. Particular attention is given to the ways in which a concept originally developed in specific science contexts was progressively adopted, reinterpreted, and extended in other domains of scientific inquiry.
A central objective of our work is to understand the conceptual path that led to the interpretation of gravity as an entropic force, as proposed by Erik Verlinde in 2010. To carry out this analysis, computational tools such as SciBERT will be used to build embedding vectors for the key concepts involved and to trace their semantic relationships across a corpus of scientific texts. By combining computational semantics with perspectives from the history of science, we examine how scientific concepts migrate across disciplinary boundaries, acquire new meanings, and contribute to the emergence of novel theoretical frameworks