Model of a gravito-electromagnetic interaction with gravitational and electromagnetic aspects: a new research program aimed at unification

While it has been established that there are four fundamental interactions, it is currently not yet understood how these can be described empirically adequately in a single foundational framework: the unification of interactions is a major open problem in physics. This paper presents a fundamentally new approach to unification, starting with the hypothesis that there is only one gravito-electronuclear interaction with four aspects (gravitational, electromagnetic, weak, and strong), which reduces to a gravito-electromagnetic interaction in a universe of stable one-component systems. First a foundational theory, distilled from earlier work in Ann. Phys. 522, 699-738 (2010); 523, 990-994 (2011); 528, 626-627 (2016), is axiomatically introduced: this yields a generic description of an elementary process by which an interaction takes place between a one-component system and its environment. Thereafter, a mathematical model of that process theory is developed: this yields a relativistic model of a gravito-electromagnetic interaction, whose gravitational and electromagnetic aspects are explicitly formulated. We show that under suitable conditions, non-relativistic classical theories of gravity and electromagnetism emerge from this model. We argue that these discrete interactions underly a ψ-epistemic quantum theory, in which the knowledge of the whereabouts of a one-component system is fundamentally probabilistic despite the fact that the interactions are deterministic. The present model has not been tested exhaustively, so we caution that further research may necessitate revisions. Our main conclusion, however, is that the present model is a good starting point for further work towards a relativistic model of a gravito-electronuclear interaction.