The End of the Search for the Grand Unified Theory

I've been thinking about gravity a lot lately. (Perhaps it is because I watched Back to the Future recently and when he goes back to the 1950's Marty says the word heavy a lot prompting Dr. Brown to ask if there's something wrong with the Earth's gravity in the future. In any case, I have been aprticular musing over the failure of science to come up with a Grand unified Theory (or Theory of Everything) that unifies the four basic forces - strong nuclear, weak nuclear, electro-magnetic and gravity. The first three have been unified for quite a while and the fourth has been quite a sticking point.

Today I realized that gravity is not one of the basic forces of the universe. Gravity evolved (I'm not sure exactly how forces evolve yet, but stick with me for a while.) from the other three (or there might have been more, some of which disappeared) some time in the early part of the universe. That makes gravity what some term an emergent property of the universe. other emergent properties are life and intelligence. Life emerged (or evolved) from non-life. We don't completely understand how that happened or how awareness or intelligence evolved. I suspect it is because these are not easily modeled events (not continuous and not linear) so need to be attacked in some other ways.

What evidence is there that gravity evolved? I see three:

1. The amount of dark matter greatly exceeds the amount of matter. Before there was gravity, there was just stuff - elementary particles, I suspect. Through the interactions of elementary particles, gravity evolved as a new "force" and proceeded to "organize" the universe. (I'm struggling with the language here since it isn't clear what gravity did to the stuff to make matter so I refer to it as organize. Similarly, life emerge red on the Earth and started organizing itself.) With emergent properties, the "universe" affected by this new property is a subset of the original universe. For example, the number of living things in the solar system (measured by mass) is a small percentage of the entire mass of the universe. Measurements show that dark matter is much more prevalent than matter that was effected by gravity. We would also see that dark matter would not be effected by gravity, but may have some other properties in common with gravitational matter (like quantum properties).

2. The pace of evolution increases by about an order of magnitude once the emergent property is entrenched. I don't have the data, but I'd bet that the time create galaxies and solar system is an order of magnitude shorter than the previous (non-gravitational) epoch.

3. Some gravitational models approach a singularity as the model gets closer to the "Big Bang." If gravity did not exist at the Big Bang, then the singularity is eliminated.

If there's anything to this evolving gravity model, then we should find evidence of a time in the universe' life where gravity did not exist. I'm not sure yet how to do that, but perhaps someone smarter than me can come up with an experiment or observation to investigate.

The corollary the gravity as an evolved force is that there is no grand unified theory to discover. Gravity is not one of the basic forces but evolved from them so just like there is no grand unified theory of life/non-life, there is no grand unified theory of the three basic forces and gravity. It would be illuminating to understand how gravity could emerge or evolve from the other forces. I certainly see some similarities (like an inverse-square power law) but we're not good at understanding evolutionary processes at this time. That gives me something to think about this week.