[justin_vanw]

I disagree, I think you are assuming far more.

My description is, from my limited understanding, just describing General Relativity, which is a totally accepted and highly verified by observation and experiment.

Where you say it is incompatible with quantization, you are assuming that gravity has any quantization to begin with, which has never been observed. You are literally 'begging the question' here, assuming that gravity quantization needs to be explained by gravitons, when neither quantization of gravity nor gravitons have ever been observed.

[lmm]

> My description is, from my limited understanding, just describing General Relativity, which is a totally accepted and highly verified by observation and experiment.

Grandparent is indeed describing GR. I wanted to try to give a more outside perspective; I think we forget just how weird GR is just because we're used to it. I wonder how we'd be thinking about quantum gravity if we'd discovered QM (which has been verified far more rigorously than GR) first.

> Where you say it is incompatible with quantization, you are assuming that gravity has any quantization to begin with, which has never been observed.

Sure, but as I said quantization is how all other known physics works. While indeed we haven't observed quantization of gravity, fundamentally gravity happens in the same universe as the rest of physics, so something has to give. (And continuous approximations to quantized reality are again exactly how the rest of physics works, whereas I struggle to even imagine how you could recover quantum behaviour from a continuous underlying theory - though I'd be fascinated to hear about any such efforts).

[justin_vanw]

So what about my initial point? How does a mass moving in the absence of other masses know that a geodesic for it is a euclidian straight path?

I would say that it doesn't, and that inertial motion in the absence of other masses is meaningless, and I think this is a key insight that allowed the development of GR in the first place (since any attempt to introduce absolute coordinate systems breaks causality because you can have multiple outcomes from the same boundary conditions, at least in the Hole Paradox).

I would say in addition that every other part of physics that I am aware of can be described locally, for example you can detect if you are in an magnetic field (at least in theory) even at the level of a single proton (since it has a magnetic moment). There is NO test you can do locally to detect that you moving inertially in the presence of a gravitational field. If you can't detect it locally, either there is a huge coincidence (in this case the coincidence is that inertial mass and gravitational mass are identical) or you can't expect to find any messenger particles, since why would you need to 'tell' a mass that it is in a gravitational field when it can't even detect it to begin with.

[lmm]

I would say you can't have anything that would have mass in the first place without a field, which in turn means you have space and time.