What If Einstein Was Wrong About Gravity?

For over 100 years, we’ve been taught that gravity is the curvature of spacetime. Heavy objects bend the fabric of space and time, and other objects roll along those curves. It’s a beautiful picture, but nobody can tell you what spacetime actually is. Seriously, ask a physicist. They’ll give you equations. They’ll give you analogies about bowling balls on trampolines. What they won’t give you is an answer to a simple question: what is this “fabric” made of? It’s not atoms. You can’t bottle it. You can’t measure it directly. It’s a mathematical abstraction that we’ve somehow decided is a real thing that can “curve” and “push” matter around. I spent years trying to find a better answer, and I think I have one.

Gravity might just be electromagnetism in disguise. All matter is made of charged particles, protons and electrons. In a “neutral” atom the charges balance out, but they don’t sit perfectly on top of each other. There’s always a tiny separation between positive and negative, and this creates what physicists call an electric dipole. Think of it like a tiny bar magnet, but electric. Dipoles attract each other. Two atoms, both electrically neutral overall, still feel a tiny pull toward each other because of these charge separations. I’m proposing that gravity is this pull, amplified across trillions of trillions of atoms all coordinating through quantum effects.

The obvious question is why nobody has noticed this before, and the answer is that the effect is laughably weak at the atomic level. Individual dipole forces fall short of explaining gravity by 40 to 75 orders of magnitude, which is a 1 followed by 40+ zeros. Bridging that gap requires quantum mechanics, specifically an interpretation called Bohmian mechanics. Unlike the standard version where particles exist as fuzzy probability clouds until you look at them, Bohmian mechanics says particles are real things with real positions, always, guided by a physical wave that connects everything non-locally. That connection lets dipoles across an entire planet coordinate and align instead of random orientations canceling each other out. Run the math and this collective behavior amplifies tiny dipole forces up to exactly what we measure as gravity.

This buys us a lot. It tells us what gravity actually is: real forces between real particles, not abstract geometry. It explains why nobody has managed to unify gravity with quantum mechanics despite a century of trying, because maybe gravity was already quantum and electromagnetic the whole time and physicists have been trying to merge two things that were never separate. It makes dark matter optional, since galaxies spin faster than visible matter can explain and physicists invented invisible matter to balance the equations, spent billions on detectors, and found nothing. And it gets rid of singularities, those points of infinite density in black holes where Einstein’s physics just stops working. In my framework, matter interactions stay finite and physics keeps working.

None of this matters if I can’t test it, so here’s where my framework disagrees with Einstein:

• Light bending: Einstein says gravity bends all colors of light equally. I say there’s about one millionth of an arcsecond difference between radio waves and visible light, which the Square Kilometer Array might see.

• Falling objects: Einstein says everything falls at the same rate regardless of composition. I say there’s a difference of about 5 parts in 10^16 based on nuclear structure, testable by next-generation atomic interferometers.

If these two match Einstein exactly, I’m wrong.

If I’m right, Einstein’s spacetime becomes a useful calculation tool but not reality, gravity and electromagnetism merge into one force, quantum mechanics gets an actual physical picture with real particles doing real things, and the century-long quest to quantize gravity turns out to have been asking the wrong question entirely. I should be upfront that my framework requires subatomic structure nobody has directly observed. The dipoles I’m talking about exist at scales smaller than our best experiments can probe, and I’ve chosen their properties specifically to avoid contradicting existing measurements. That’s a big assumption. But so is dark matter. We can’t see it, can’t detect it, and every time an experiment comes up empty the theorists just tweak its properties and keep looking. At least my theory puts specific numbers on the table, measurements that could prove me wrong.

The full paper with technical details is here: [link]. Tell me where I’m wrong.

Note: this is a working paper undergoing revisions and not it’s final form.