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IIRC, Einstein actually spent quite a bit of effort trying to reformulate electromagnetism as a geometric curvature just like gravity, but eventually published a paper admitting failure. I recently saw some physicist talking about revisiting that with some new tricks because maybe it wasn't such a bad idea after all.

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Whatever solution is simplest, it's probably better. Every rule has an associated cost and, if the universe itself can be seen as a state transformation engine going over a matrix of states, the fewer the rules, the more likely it is.

And yes, this is bordering some form of faith - that the universe principles should be as efficient and simple as they can possibly be.

That doesn't make sense to me because electromagnetism is both an attractive and repulsive force (can pull objects together or push them apart). Gravity is purely an attractive force which makes sense when explained as warped spacetime. But I'm also not a physicist...

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