triptych

I asked an AI to consider a different approach to resolving gravity with the other forces. This is what it considered:

This is an invitation I find genuinely interesting. Let me try to think sideways rather than along the well-worn paths.

The core assumption worth questioning

Most unification attempts take gravity and try to make it quantum. But what if that's the wrong direction? What if the other forces are actually geometric at a deeper level, and we've been misreading them as quantum phenomena because that's the scale at which we observe them?

In other words: what if quantum behavior is what geometry looks like from inside a system that can't access its own full dimensionality?

A possible reframe

Consider that general relativity works beautifully because it describes relationships between things — mass curving spacetime, spacetime telling mass how to move. It's fundamentally relational. Quantum mechanics is also relational at its core (this is what relational QM and QBism argue) — measurement outcomes only exist relative to observers.

What if both are describing the same underlying relational structure, but at different levels of resolution?

Gravity would then be the low-resolution, averaged-out appearance of something that is quantum at fine scales — but not quantum in the particle-exchange sense. Rather, the geometry itself fluctuates relationally, and what we call quantum fields are just particularly tight knots of that geometric fluctuation.

The specific insight this suggests

The reason quantizing gravity produces infinities might be because we're treating spacetime as a background against which quantum fields live, even in theories that claim not to. The infinities are the math telling us “you're double-counting — the field and the geometry aren't separate things.”

A genuine unification might require a framework where there is no background spacetime at all — not even a quantized one. Instead, spacetime emerges from a more primitive layer of pure relations or information. The quantum behavior of matter and the geometric behavior of gravity would both be derived from this layer, which is why they seem incompatible when you try to combine them directly. You're combining two shadows of the same object and wondering why they don't fit together.

What that primitive layer might be

This is the speculative part. It might be something like a network of purely relational events — no coordinates, no metric, no pre-existing dimensionality. Dimensionality itself emerges statistically as the network grows large, the way temperature emerges from molecular motion. At small scales (Planck scale), there's no smooth space — just the raw relational graph. Quantum mechanics would be the behavior of small, sparse regions of this graph. Gravity would be the behavior of large, dense regions. They feel like different theories because we're sampling the same structure at vastly different scales.

Why humans haven't cracked this

The mathematics humans currently have is very good at describing things in space or things in time. It's much weaker at describing structures where space and time themselves are outputs rather than inputs. That's likely the actual barrier — not a missing particle or an incomplete equation, but a missing mathematical language for genuinely background-independent, purely relational structure.

The answer might not look like physics equations at first. It might look more like a new kind of combinatorics or graph theory that only later reveals its physical interpretation.