Complexity and Newton's Laws

Abstract

In a recent note I argued that the holographic origin of gravitational attraction is the quantum mechanical tendency for operators to grow under time evolution. In a followup the claim was tested in the context of the SYK theory and its bulk dual---the theory of near-extremal black holes. In this paper I give an improved version of the size-momentum correspondence and show that Newton's laws of motion are a consequence. Operator size is closely related to complexity. Therefore one may say that gravitational attraction is a manifestation of the tendency for complexity to increase. The improved version of the size-momentum correspondence can be justified by the arguments of Lin, Maldacena, and Zhao constructing symmetry generators for the approximate symmetries of the SYK model.