Why I Believe the Vacuum Holds the Answer to Gravity

I have spent the past year asking a question that most physicists would consider either too ambitious or too naive: What if Newton's gravitational constant G is not a free parameter at all, but something the universe computes from the structure of the quantum vacuum?

This question did not come from nowhere. It grew, step by step, from a framework I have been building since May 2025 — what I now call The Ashebo Method. And in February 2026, I published a paper that I believe brings this question to a sharp, testable point: Vacuum Strain and the Yang–Mills Mass Gap.

I want to use this first blog post to share not just the result, but the intuition behind it — the chain of reasoning that led me here, and why I think the physics community should take it seriously.

The Chain of Thought

It started with a simple observation about asymmetry. In my emergent gravity work, I showed that the gravitational coupling can be written as the product of two quantities: the baryon asymmetry A(t) and the symmetry restoration rate R(t). The restoration rate turned out to be deeply connected to the helium-4 mass deficit fraction — approximately 0.7594%, the fraction of mass that hydrogen loses when it fuses into helium. This is not a number I chose. It is a number the universe chose, through nuclear physics.

The baryon asymmetry A(t) connects to the fine-structure constant through a squared relationship. Again, not a parameter I tuned — it is a consequence of the electromagnetic structure of matter.

When I multiplied these two quantities together and scaled by the appropriate mass and distance factors, I got Newton's G to within 0.064% of the measured value. Zero free parameters. No fitting. Just nuclear physics and electromagnetism, combined through a specific physical mechanism.

That was the moment I knew something real was happening.

From Gravity to the Mass Gap

But the question remained: why does this mechanism work? What is the deeper physics?

The answer, I believe, lies in the quantum vacuum itself. The QCD vacuum is not empty — it is filled with gluon field fluctuations that condense into a measurable quantity called the gluon condensate, ⟨(α_s/π)G²⟩ ≈ (0.33 GeV)⁴. This number has been measured independently through QCD sum rules, lattice simulations, and charmonium spectroscopy. It is one of the most well-established nonperturbative quantities in all of physics.

What I realized is that this condensate is not just a number — it is a strain. The vacuum is under tension from the self-interaction of gluon fields, and this strain has a characteristic energy scale. Using a Hubbard-Stratonovich transformation — a standard technique in condensed matter physics — I showed that this strain naturally generates a mass for the gluon field. The predicted mass: 1.65 ± 0.15 GeV.

The lattice QCD community has independently computed the scalar glueball mass at approximately 1.71 GeV. My prediction, derived from a completely different starting point with zero adjustable parameters, lands within 3.5% of that value.

This is not a coincidence. This is the vacuum telling us something.

What This Means for the Millennium Problem

The Yang–Mills existence and mass gap problem is one of the seven Clay Millennium Prize Problems. It asks, roughly: prove that pure Yang–Mills theory has a strictly positive mass gap — that the lightest particle in the theory has nonzero mass.

I do not claim to have solved this problem. Let me be clear about that. The Clay problem requires a level of mathematical rigor that my paper does not achieve. What my paper does is something different but, I believe, equally important: it identifies the physical mechanism that generates the mass gap, it predicts the numerical value of that gap, and it reduces the mathematical problem to a concrete, well-defined question.

That question is: Can we prove that the gluon condensate is strictly positive in the continuum limit of Yang–Mills theory?

If the answer is yes, then the mass gap follows from the Hubbard-Stratonovich mechanism. The entire Millennium Problem reduces to establishing a single inequality: ⟨G²⟩ > 0.

I recently watched Sourav Chatterjee's lecture at the Harvard Center of Mathematical Sciences and Applications, where he laid out his vision for solving the Yang–Mills problem within the next 10 to 15 years. His approach — building rigorous Yang–Mills theory from lattice gauge theory using probabilistic methods — is exactly the mathematical framework within which my physical mechanism could be rigorized. The lattice is where the Hubbard-Stratonovich transformation is already rigorous. The challenge is taking the continuum limit while preserving the physics.

I also watched Martin Hairer's lecture at the Clay Research Conference, where he described a complementary approach through stochastic quantization and regularity structures. His framework offers a second, independent pathway for making my mechanism mathematically precise.

The fact that two Fields Medal-caliber mathematicians are actively working on the mathematical infrastructure that my physical mechanism requires — this gives me confidence that the timing is right.

The Unification

What excites me most is not any single result, but the coherence of the framework. The same physics that generates the mass gap also explains why Newton's G has the value it does. The gluon condensate determines the vacuum strain, the vacuum strain determines the mass gap, and the mass gap connects to the baryon asymmetry that drives emergent gravity.

Particles are not fundamental — they are geometric structures, resonance valleys, formed in the interaction of compression and energy-release fields. Gravity is not fundamental — it emerges from the collective dynamics of these valleys. And the constants of nature are not arbitrary — they are computed by the vacuum from the self-consistent requirements of quantum field theory.

This is what The Ashebo Method is about. Not a single paper, but a coherent picture of reality that connects the smallest scales (gluon fields inside protons) to the largest scales (the gravitational dynamics of galaxy clusters) through a single chain of physical reasoning.

An Invitation

I am an independent researcher. I do not have the institutional backing of a university department or the resources of a large collaboration. What I have is a framework that makes specific, falsifiable predictions — and those predictions keep matching observation.

I am sharing this work openly because I believe physics advances through honest engagement with ideas, regardless of where those ideas come from. If you are a mathematician working on constructive field theory, I would welcome your scrutiny of the Hubbard-Stratonovich mechanism. If you are a lattice QCD practitioner, I would welcome a comparison of my predictions with your simulations. If you are a student trying to understand what the mass gap problem is really about, I hope my explainer pages on this website help.

The vacuum is not empty. It is strained, structured, and full of information. I believe it holds the answer to gravity, and I have spent the past year trying to listen to what it is telling us.

— Yohannes Beyene Ashebo Alberta, Canada February 2026