The article explores the idea that pure kinetic energy in form of photons indeed might have at least gravity-like properties.
My presumption is that atoms are somehow made of really high energy EM fields so that they appear to be massive. Consequently, atoms having mass or photons having inertia are responsible for gravitation, and that could mean that EM fields are the cause of gravity entirely. The problem with that presumption is that perhaps there is no way to check.
Considering noone died from waving iron rods through the air by way of electrocution (other than lightning) I'd say that means gravity is not an EM field.
There is also a different test: EM fields are either positive or negative in charge. If you have three objects, in an EM field they cannot all three attract eachother, one object must be pushed away from one of the other two.
Considering we don't see that behaviour in our solar system, gravity cannot be an EM field.
Quarks have -1/3 or +2/3 charge in the standard model and presumably(?) at high enough energies they separate out into a quark-gluon plasma thus exposing the universe to their unholy fractional charges. Above 2 trillion Kelvin according to wikipedia.
Saying “explore”, “idea”, “might” makes it sound as if this was not a well-established 100-years-old theory.
> My presumption is that atoms are somehow made of really high energy EM fields so that they appear to be massive.
Somehow... The easiest way to proceed in that program of research may be to rename the standard model as ElectroMagnetism and try to get a unified theory of the strong, weak and the-force-previously-known-as-em forces. Then you unify that with GR and you’re done :-)
Certainly the unification of electromagnetism + the weak force is understood, and there is a theory (or several theories) about electroweak + strong unification: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Unified_Theory .
But we may be close, for some values of close :-)
Fields are mathematical tools, they are not - without wanting to go down the philosophical rabbit hole - real things out there in the universe.
And the thing about everything just being electromagnetic fields is nonsense, physicists understand physics way better than you do. Sorry to sound condescending, but the internet already has enough obviously wrong ideas by random people without a clue what they are talking but.
So these fields can’t interact with everything everywhere, only the portion of the universe In the field’s lightcone. if the universe keeps this up there’s a chance some day Everything will be so stretched out that the fields will be basically redshifted to null, so not interacting with anything anywhere. That’d be lame.
Isn't dark matter most likely some kind of material that has mass, but no EM interaction?
We also know that there are interactions inside atoms (the strong and weak forces) that have no known relation to electro-magnetism, so I'm not sure what you are getting at.
The next guess here is that dark energy has a much much higher rest energy so that no photon in this universe is able to interact with it via EM fields. The search for dark matter was unsuccessful so far, and the LHC is still trying to achieve higher energies to be able to detect dark matter. So, dark matter is just a guess.
The interactions inside atoms seem to have no known relations to EM, because, and this is my guess, there are much higher energies at work than we know. So, if dark matter is hiding behind high energies so that EM interaction seems impossible, why should it be different for EM interactions inside atoms. There still is a slim chance that it might be EM, just at much higher energies.
The electromagnetic and the weak interaction are known to be different aspects of the unified electroweak interaction. There are several grand unified theories and a few hints that at even higher energies the electroweak and strong interaction also unifiy into the electronuclear interaction. Due to the high energies involved, only indirect experimental evidence seems accessable for the forseeable future but there are various groups looking for hints. I am not aware of any uncontroversial results but there are a few non-reproducable experiments, for example observations of magnetic monopoles, which might be due to experimental error but also due to the rarity of magnetic monopoles.
