On the Structural Asymmetry Between General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, with a Mathematical Companion

This deposit contains two documents. The first, "On the Structural Asymmetry Between General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics: Why Gravity Cannot Be Unified as a Conventional Field," is a short, plain-language essay arguing that gravity is not a force within spacetime but the structure that defines spacetime (the "Gravitational Baseline Principle"), and that both spacetime and gravity emerge from a deeper substrate of correlated quantum systems with no geometry of its own. The second, "The Gravitational Baseline Principle: A Minimal Mathematical Companion," gives the mathematics behind that claim, using established results only. Locality alone gives a universal speed limit (the Lieb-Robinson bound). Requiring that speed limit to be a single, constant speed of light fixes how distance is read from correlation, and the resulting space is flat on a regular pattern of interaction, as the observed universe is. Treating entanglement thermodynamically gives Einstein's field equation as an equation of state (Jacobson), with the cosmological constant left free, so the observed positive value is allowed. The universality of gravity follows when the curvature produced by matter is carried by a constrained collective field of the substrate, in the same way Gauss's law makes electric fields universal, and the Weinberg-Witten theorem, together with observations of gravitational waves and the cosmological constant, leaves this as the only consistent form for emergent gravity.