Gravitational Fields Are Probably Electron Densities.
Terms such as quantum gravity sound baffling and overwhelming to most people, so let’s just break down what that term means. When we refer to a quantum of something, we just mean the smallest, indivisible unit of that thing. If we’re looking for a quantum of light, for instance, we say that it’s the photon. If we’re looking for a quantum of the nuclear forces, we call that the gluon. The quanta of nature are just the elementary particles of physics’ standard model, a sort of periodic table for the basic building blocks of nature. As for gravity, we all know what that is. It’s the force described by Isaac Newton that famously keeps the Earth in orbit around the Sun and the Moon in orbit around the Earth. As for quantum gravity, what we’re looking for is the smallest, indivisible unit of the gravitational field.
Physicists have been looking for this unit for some time. Almost a century has passed since Paul Dirac first derived his famous equation, the Dirac equation, which sought to put our best theory of gravity (general relativity) together with the then neophyte quantum mechanics. Dirac also initially postulated that the background of space was filled with a sea of elementary particles with negative energy, and that this was the gravitational field. The idea of gravity having its basis in some sort of quantum, particle, or atom, has a very long history indeed, and in modern times it goes back to the work of Swiss mathematician Nicolas Fatio de Duillier in the 18th Century. De Duillier was a fellow of the Royal Society and a contemporary of Isaac Newton. He postulated that the basis of Newtonian gravity was in streams of tiny invisible particles ‘flowing’ around bodies with mass. This “push” or “shadow” gravity would take many incarnations in the succeeding centuries, evolving into Maxwell’s notion of the mechanical aether, and ultimately into Albert Einstein’s concept of spacetime.
De Duillier is something of a sidelined figure in history, though he was an extraordinary man. He showed early promise in natural philosophy and was elected to the Royal Society at the young age of 24. However he joined a millenarian sect and was sent to the stocks for sedition just years later; this may account for why we don’t still talk about his work today. Another great thinker who’s work has been unfairly sidelined (another Swiss gentleman, interestingly) is Ernst Stueckelberg, who laid the foundations for massive electrodynamics and who (in Richard Feynman’s opinion) may have had a right to share in the Nobel Prize for the discovery of quantum electrodynamics. After receiving the Nobel Prize, Feynman is recorded as having pointed to Stueckelberg in the crowd and saying: “that man deserved the prize!” I’m digressing somewhat from a slightly obvious point, and this really ought to be obvious; and I feel the ultimate physics of this suggestion so far as gravity is concerned is very intuitive and easy to understand. We see electron densities around atomic nuclei as fuzzy little clouds of electron. The idea is that anything made of atoms has a residual sort of fuzz that attracts other objects to it.
This is at odds with our current understanding of quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics as extant predicts that there’s a very sharp cut-off from the electron density and that the probability of an electron tunneling to astronomical distances (to account for the Moon being in orbit around Earth, for instance) is too minute to account for the force of gravity. If quantum mechanics were to relax its strict limits on the range of electron tunneling, we would be able to explain gravity quite easily using electron tunneling. Furthermore, I doubt very much that it would interfere with our observations or experimental understanding of electron densities. It might give us different computer models, but I think this idea sits very nicely with what we can observe under, say, electron microscopes. Very simply, the negatively-charged electrons would form a cloud around a massive object (such as the Earth) and these electrons would tunnel near the positively-charged protons of other objects and thereby exert a force of attraction over those objects. These electrons would never stay in the same place and would be constantly tunneling to new locations and getting replaced by new electrons from other parts of the universe. This would lead to the ‘flows’ (which is a bad way of describing it) of electrons that De Duillier spoke of in his shadow gravity model.
Helpfully, quantum electrodynamics (our most successful theory in physics) also tells us that electrons interact with particles of light. This means that, with clouds of electrons, we have a means of explaining the phenomena in general relativity of masses causing light to bend. Light particles would enter the electron density of, say, a planet, and bounce around between the electrons until they’re emitted again on the other side. This was one of the major predictions of Einstein’s theory of general relativity, what we call the ‘reflective capacity of stars’. This is the counterintuitive notions that stars reflect light as well as emit it. However, this is something that we see all the time with black holes. Black holes are well-known to have firewalls surrounding them, enormous areas where huge amounts of gas, dust, rock, as well as light particles, are getting trapped. Since electrons are a means of explaining both the trapping of gas, dust and rock; via exerting forces of attraction over the protons in those substances; and light, the electron makes for a credible, central element of the theory of quantum gravity.
More evidence of this likely central role of electrons comes from supernova observations. We observe that neutrinos (neutrally-charged standard model particles) escape supernovae before the light from the supernova escapes. This means it’s highly likely that the gravitational electron density is collapsing and constraining the light that would otherwise be escaping into space along with the neutrinos. Still more evidence comes from the phenomena of beta decay; that is, the fact that neutrons (when they escape atomic nuclei and propagate through space as free particles) decay after about 15 minutes. Neutrons decay into protons and leave behind an electron and (supposedly) an electron antineutrino. I suspect that background electrons are liberated in this process and that, via the exchange of a W particle, the neutron changes into a proton. This explains why neutrons are so short-lived compared to protons. Think of it, all that force from the background is operating on the proton, squeezing it, keeping its quarks in place, while the neutron has no charge to interact with the negatively-charged background and instead gets sheared apart.
Further still, there are large holes in theory of general relativity in the form of the open problems of dark matter and dark energy. We may be able to explain dark energy and the universe’s accelerating expansion as a consequence of light building up between galaxy clusters. Very simply, the light gets emitted from the galaxy clusters and keeps bouncing between them because the gravitational electron density of the galaxy clusters prevents the light from being able to escape to anywhere else. As for dark matter, we need to factor in the rotations of objects. Another thing Einstein managed to successfully do with his theory of general relativity was to account for the perihelion precession of Mercury, this phenomenon that, every so often, Mercury will shift on its orbit; Einstein explained this via invoking the Sun’s wobble and that gravitational waves coming from the Sun cause Mercury to shift. That’s part of the solution I suspect, but it’s not the whole story. The fact that Mercury is not a rotating object also factors into things. If you think of the Earth, which rotates and does not exhibit precession in its orbit anywhere near as often as Mercury, you’ll see what I mean. The electrons from Earth’s gravitational field will be colliding more often due to rotation with the electrons from the Sun’s gravitational field, thereby creating a force of resistance and fixing its orbit in place.
You can then apply the same phenomenon to galactic rotation curves and uncover the reason why Vera Rubin and others observed stars at the extremities of galaxies rotating at a faster rate than those near the centre. The clouds of electrons from the supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy, plus all the gravitational fields of all the stars in our galaxy, would be acting like molasses, preventing the stars closer to the centre of the galaxy from rotating around the centre quite so quickly. So there you have it, instead of looking for axions, or some other new particle to explain dark matter, by removing one outmoded assumption from our theory of quantum mechanics, we’re lead into a harmonisation of particle physics with general relativity; we fix general relativity with a particle we’re all familiar with, the electron. Furthermore, the gravitoelectroweak interaction responsible for mediating the force of attraction between electrons and protons would be formed of the simultaneous exchange of two W particles (a W+ and a W-); this means that the gauge field formed would be spin-2 and have zero mass (since it’d be two mutually-attracted W particles with the mutual attraction cancelling out their masses); and that’s exactly what we suspected the graviton (gravity particle) to be anyway.
This is a revival of the aether, and De Duillier’s model. This is the missing ingredient we need in physics to give what Richard Feynman called a “quantum upgrade to general relativity”. It focuses on something rather intuitive, that it’s the same force ultimately keeping the electron in ‘orbit’ around the atomic nucleus as it is keeping the Moon in orbit around the Earth. We can simplify our quantum mechanics, and we can physics a lot easier to understand for everyone while simultaneously solving many of our outstanding problems. We can revive older ideas that have long and prestigious histories in physics and cosmology; we can accept that our ancestors weren’t as stupid as we might like to think they are, and we can move on with merely an enhanced understanding of a very old idea. Gravitational fields are probably electron densities, electron densities would be surrounding all objects composed of atoms and forming clouds; on cosmological scales this would create a sort of aether. So there it is, quantum aether is in the game, and the theory of aether never really left us in any case. But perhaps that’s a topic for another article.
