Quantum Gravity and the Cult of the Graviton

Why the graviton isn't the silly superstition I presumed it to be.

In ER = EPR, gravity and spacetime are emergent rather than fundamental, but in most solutions for the quantum gravity problem, gravity has been presumed to be the fourth of the fundamental forces, alongside electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force, and the weak nuclear force. This has physicists searching for the missing gravity-causing particle, something they call the graviton. In my ignorance, the idea of the graviton seemed silly, almost superstitious. I couldn’t understand why they presumed there had to be a particle at all, and I didn’t really figure it out until this morning.

We talk about forces being fundamental, but this proves to be misleading. Fields interact, and that interaction creates the “fundamental” forces. Each of these fields, when excited enough at given location, manifests themselves as a particle. If gravity is a fundamental force, then it’s a field that interacts with other fields, and it will express itself as a particle when excited enough. Might as well call that particle a graviton.

If gravity is emergent, that doesn’t necessarily eliminate the graviton, although it would no longer be a particle. Unlike the standard model, where gravity is a ripple moving through pre-existing spacetime, in ER = EPR, spacetime is emergent, and gravity is a rippling of that spacetime network. If that’s the case, you could trace a graviton moving through spacetime, but if you looked close, you’d see you’re actually tracking movement as it’s translated through the entangled quantum states that make up spacetime, not a separate particle.

Meanwhile, General Relativity doesn’t see gravity as a force. Matter and energy bend spacetime, and that’s what we call gravity. Relativity mathematically details this action but doesn’t reveal the mechanism behind it. In my first essay, we talked about Entropic Gravity, a theory that has the flow of information as the mechanism. It’s a thermodynamic view of gravity and would erase the possibility of any sort of graviton. There’s no apparent particle in entropy.

Entropic Gravity proposes an emergent model, unlike Einstein’s view. As Einstein saw it, spacetime is fundamental, and gravity would express itself as a wave formed of pure geometry. Once again, there’s no fundamental or apparent graviton.

I expect science will eventually determine if the graviton is fundamental, apparent, or non-existent, but even if it’s not real, it’s not the silly superstition I once believed.

Our study of the graviton has also hinted at the basic difference in how General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics view spacetime. For Einstein, it was smooth, continuous, and deterministic. In a deterministic framework, from a given starting point, the same conclusion will always be reached. In sharp contrast, Quantum Mechanics sees spacetime as, to quote the Doctor, “a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff,” and a probabilistic foundation replaces certainty.

ER = EPR bridges the two.

When talking about the apparent graviton, what we see depends on how close we are. What appears to be a particle is really the translation of movement through the medium, but you only see that up close. Similarly, ER = EPR bridges General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics by allowing each to be true at their own scale levels. Pull back, and the chaos of the quantum states averages out. Think of the great mountains and valleys of Earth; if the planet were shrunk down to the size of a billiard ball, it would feel just as smooth. Einstein’s smooth spacetime is an illusion of scale. Probabilistic shifts at a quantum level become the predictable, smooth bending of spacetime, and the math works at either scale.

— Thaddeus Thomas

PS: all corrections welcome.

If you’ve missed my previous installments, ER = EPR is a conjecture that supposes wormholes and entanglement to be the same phenomenon.

How I make my physics articles: I learn about physics in the most amateur ways possible, I suppose, by listening to podcasts, watching YouTube, and asking questions of AI. These are the tools that allowed me to move past nagging questions to potential answers. Physics is a hobby, and I decided to start writing about it to a) force a more coherent thinking process and b) create a record. When I have an essay idea, I draft it and let AI tell me where I’m off scientifically and suggest grammar corrections, but I don’t accept any attempts to rewrite my work for me. Writing’s my joy, even if I realize my nonfiction prose isn’t as strong as my fiction. What’s the point if a machine takes that from me? (AI isn’t allowed near my fiction, by the way.) Even using it to test my science (or learn it in the first place) is tricky. It wants so bad to agree with you that it occasionally deforms science to be more in line with your reasoning, a happenstance that can be ferreted out by approaching the same issue from different angles.

As an example of AI correcting my science, I originally wrote: Pull back, and the chaos of the quantum fields averages out. This was wrong. The fields are on top of spacetime. In ER = EPR it’s the quantum states, not the fields, that create spacetime. The more accurate sentence now reads: Pull back, and the chaos of the quantum states averages out.

When I let the AI review the entire piece, including the critique of the AI itself, it offered nothing but praise and left three errors uncorrected. I don’t want to anthropomorphize the program, but that feels passive aggressive.

The issue I identified is known as the sycophancy problem, and I want to be clear that eliminating it entirely would lose long-term educational potential. It can cause problems for those seeking a one-time answer, and if you’re not looking to eliminate confirmation bias, I see it continuing the same issues caused by social-media algorithms. I would like to see these problems handled without losing the sycophancy entirely, however, because a teacher who looks for ways to show you where you’re right encourages ongoing studies.

For simplicity’s sake, I said earlier that I ask AI questions, but the fascinating part of the process is learning some aspect of a cosmological or quantum process and then intuitively uncovering a potential next step. I feed that hypothesis into the AI, and where a human teacher would likely shoot me down for being 20% wrong, the program explains the theories that agree with my hypothesis and corrects the aspects that are in error.

The solutions it gives me are largely theoretical physics, and I worried about that early on. Now I understand that it’s because I’m dealing with issues left unsolved by the standard model.

Image credit: The social media title image for this article comes from “Blink,” series 3, episode 10 of Doctor Who, and it’s where the “big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff” quote originated.