ethan@utastro.UUCP (Ethan Vishniac) (09/18/84)
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This is a well known problem in the unification of gravity and
the rest of physics. Simply put the problem is that the energy
zero-point is arbitrary in most of physics. If you add a potential
energy which is constant in space and time it doesn't affect anything.
However, one's naive interpretation of gravity would be that since
all mass-energy couples to gravity that this uniform background is
self-gravitating and produces a gravitational field. The hope
is that when gravity is unified with the other forces of nature
there will be some obvious way of seeing that the zero-point oscillations
of the various background fields don't couple to the gravitational field.
There is no generally accepted approach to solving this problem.
Ethan Vishniac