The Emergent Gravity Program: A Review

This review presents, as a single navigable object, a six-work research program [68, 69, 70,

71, 72, 73] whose thesis is that the gravitational sector of known physics is entanglement

bookkeeping, and that the unique effective Lagrangian this bookkeeping selects—once the

empirically confirmed matter content is installed—is the Standard Model minimally cou-

pled to Einstein–Cartan gravity, with exactly one parameter-free interaction beyond known

physics. We summarize the program’s logic (certify, select, assemble, close), its methodolog-

ical commitments (explicit epistemic labeling of every claim as proved [P], conjectured [C],

or open [O]; machine-verification suites shipped with the papers whose results they certify),

its principal theorems, its declared limits, and the single computation on which its two re-

maining open items jointly depend. The bibliography is the complete union of the program’s

references, provided so that this review can serve as the program’s canonical entry point.