I Newton vs Einstein: Explaining Other Forces

[sbaker8688]

Under Newton, gravity is what I term an "invisible magic rope" that pulls you down.

Enter Einstein. We do away with the invisible magic rope, and say that space (or space-time) is warped by mass.

However, we still have other forces, that (as far as I know, anyway) are "invisible magic ropes." The electrical force, for instance, or the magnetic force.

QUESTION: Is it possible, and/or desirable, to do the "Einstein treatment" with these other forces, and invoke some kind of warpage, either of space, or of some field, to explain the force? Or is this already being done, unbeknownst to me?

 

[Dale]

You may want to look into Kaluza Klein theory.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaluza–Klein_theory

 

[PeterDonis]

Is it possible, and/or desirable, to do the "Einstein treatment" with these other forces, and invoke some kind of warpage, either of space, or of some field, to explain the force? Or is this already being done, unbeknownst to me?

Yes, it is. @Dale mentioned Kaluza-Klein theory; but a more modern version of the same idea turns up in string theory, in which all of the forces other than gravity are accounted for by invoking extra spacetime dimensions that are not directly observable, and curvatures in these extra dimensions appear to us as interactions.

The key limitation of all these models, at least so far, is that they don't make any testable predictions which are different from those of the standard treatment of the non-gravitational interactions, which is quantum field theory. So there's no way to do an experiment that could distinguish between these two kinds of models.