Gravity and the quantum: the world may not be what it seems

Whenever one attempts to include the gravitational force in models of quantized elementary particles, a spooky kind of non-locality appears to emerge, either because attempts to renormalize the theory tend to violate unitarity, or because attempts to understand quantum mechanics in terms of some deterministic underlying theory also appear to require some spooky non-locality. In contrast, the only tested particle theory, the Standard Model, is perfectly local. Different from the Standard Model, Quantum Gravity suggests that physically independent degrees of freedom are denumerable. To get a different intuitive picture of what is going in, we take a new look at the role of black holes. It is suggested to reduce the local scale parameters to be locally unobservable, which would make it easier to understand the back reaction of Hawking radiation on the space-time metric. New approaches to Quantum Mechanics appear to allow for an interpretation in terms of a local, deterministic model, to be combined with General Relativity.