Einstein's Equations from the Stretched Future Light Cone

Abstract: We define the stretched future light cone, a timelike hypersurface composed of the worldlines of radially accelerating observers with constant and uniform proper acceleration. By attributing temperature and entropy to this hypersurface, we derive Einstein's equations from the Clausius relation. Moreover, we show that the gravitational equations of motion for a broad class of diffeomorphism-invariant theories of gravity can be obtained from thermodynamics on the stretched future light cone, provided the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy is replaced by the Wald entropy.