Can Gravity Be Explained as a Composite of Electromagnetic and Strong Forces?

[MiloOfCroton]

I've been looking for work on this, and I was hoping someone could confirm or deny that anyone has done any before. I am referring to gravity being a composite of the electromagnetic (or maybe electro-magnetic-strong-weak) force between many different pieces of matter with a mostly nullified net electrical charge (a lack of a very strong net N/S pole). All I could find was composite gravity work being done on how gravitons could be put together. Maybe gravitons don't carry any kind of gravity force at all?

To put it another way, does anyone think they will never find the Higgs Boson, but the Standard Model will still be complete (as a unified field theory) without it? In other words, mass is an emergent phenomenon rather than a fundamental one.

I'm not trying to imply that this is my theory. I'm simply looking for past work where this has been studied before. If this is still against the rules of the forum (and how could it be?), I'll self-police and delete it (no need to ban me).

 

[DrewD]

I've been looking for work on this, and I was hoping someone could confirm or deny that anyone has done any before. I am referring to gravity being a composite of the electromagnetic (or maybe electro-magnetic-strong-weak) force between many different pieces of matter with a mostly nullified net electrical charge (a lack of a very strong net N/S pole). All I could find was composite gravity work being done on how gravitons could be put together. Maybe gravitons don't carry any kind of gravity force at all?

I don't really see what you are getting at, but Einstein worked long and hard to combine gravitation and electromagnetism with no luck. He was clearly trying to make a classical theory of both though. I don't know particulars about work within QM

To put it another way, does anyone think they will never find the Higgs Boson, but the Standard Model will still be complete (as a unified field theory) without it?

Wiki

 

[michael879]

1) It would be very difficult if not impossible to rephrase gravity as a sum of electroweak and strong effects. We know enough about gravity to rule this out as a realistic possibility (i.e. even if it was possible it would require an insane amount of fine-tuning to get G out of the other force constants). The weak force can immediately be ruled out as its a massive field. Likewise, gluons are strongly charged so they can be ruled out. So all that's really left is the E&M field, and while it may resemble gravity in some situations it is fundamentally different (vector vs. tensor, charge vs. mass, etc).

2) The Higgs boson has nothing to do with gravity, and it has already been found at the LHC! There are theories beyond the standard model that break electroweak symmetry through dynamic means rather than by introducing a new field (notably technicolor). However since these theories don't predict a scalar boson that acts like the SM Higgs, they are all in trouble now.

*edit* Kaluza-Klein theory is a 5-dimensional formulation of GR which I honestly don't know enough about. However I have heard it claimed that it nicely unifies E&M and gravity classically (I've also heard its not very nice and requires some unjustified additions).