Is There a Unified Theory for the Other Three Forces?

[thetexan]

There have been heretofore 4 forces generally acknowledged, weak, strong, electromagnetic and gravity. And there has been the quest to unify those 4. As I understand it the first 3 have for all intents and purposes been unified and that gravity is the holdout.

But since gravity is not a force but a resultant of other effects, namely the warping of space, and that the movement of a body in a system due to what we use to call gravity is simply the easily explained warped movement due to space/time warpage, can't we say that there is really no such thing as a independent, unexplainable force of gravity.

And if that is the case don't we pretty much have a unified theory of the other 3 real forces?

tex

 

[jtbell]

But since gravity is not a force but a resultant of other effects, namely the warping of space, and that the movement of a body in a system due to what we use to call gravity is simply the easily explained warped movement due to space/time warpage, can't we say that there is really no such thing as a independent, unexplainable force of gravity.

It's certainly possible that things may turn out that way. On the other hand, it may turn out that our current notion of gravity as "warped spacetime" makes predictions that are only an approximation to more-refined experimental observations in the future, and that some sort of unified theory will actually work better in the end.

Despite the impression that many sources give, you should never take our current theories as being the "final word", only "the best that we know of so far."

 

[The_Duck]

There have been heretofore 4 forces generally acknowledged, weak, strong, electromagnetic and gravity. And there has been the quest to unify those 4. As I understand it the first 3 have for all intents and purposes been unified and that gravity is the holdout.

No. Electromagnetism and the weak force are unified in the electroweak theory, which is part of the standard model. The term "grand unified theory" refers to attempts to unify the electroweak force with the strong force. Many nice theoretical models--that is, many different "grand unified theories"--have been proposed which accomplish such a unification. None have been confirmed by experiment, and a number have been ruled out by experiment.