Abstract

The mass deficit of the universe may be intimately related to the mechanism of gravity.  We address a critical deficiency of the standard model - the nature and origin of space-time.  Although gravitation has no place in the standard model, it can be shown that within the constructs of quantum electrodynamics gravitational energy can be calculated in a straightforward manner, yielding the experimental value of G.  The assumption alone is made that the vacumm is a cold plasma in the form of a conserved, boson-lattice of electron-positron pairs, and these pairs are the dark matter of the universe.  This assumption is not an ad hoc construction, but an unappreciated element of QED and Dirac electron theory, and the model predicts that current experiments designed to elucidate the nature of dark matter will find nothing in amounts sufficient to satisfy cosmological needs.