QED describes the strong, weak and electromagnetic forces in terms of exchanges of messenger particles.
Yes it's a Quantum field theory and so that is how it works.
It seems reasonable, therefore, to use the same description for gravity, although the graviton, which would be the messenger particle, has not yet been found.
Yes but nature may not care to be reasonable
A quantum theory of gravity would necessitate the reality of gravitational waves which, like gravitons, have not yet been observed. There is indirect evidence of the existence of gravitational waves, and if they exist, it is reasonable to consider the graviton as an excitation of a wave in the gravitational field.
Ok you are mixing up things here a gravitation wave is a ripple in spacetime metrics in GR theory.
A graviton is particle or virtual particle in a gravitational field theory.
So we have seen indirect evidence of a gravity wave but no indirect evidence of a graviton.
An electron is considered as being surrounded by a retinue of virtual photons, constantly appearing and disappearing, and the energy of this combination is calculated as going to infinity in the case of each electron. In the same way, every matter particle must be considered as having a similar retinue of gravitons, the energy of which would go to infinity.
Yes, No, Maybe you have so many different concepts mixed up it's hard to work
Lets start with what a Field theory says, so start here
http://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/the-higgs-particle/the-higgs-faq-2-0/The key points as Matt underlines
a) A field is present everywhere in space and time,
b) The field can be, on average, zero or not zero, and
c) Can have waves in it.
d) And if it is a quantum field, its waves are made from particles.
So a GR gravity wave is (c) while a graviton is (d) if that helps above.
He further distinguishes by referring back to earlier articles that a "virtual particle" is simply a disturbance in the field, a "real particle" is a resonant wave that persists in the field. There are other tricky things about virtual particles that they do not have to precisely obey particle behaviour because they are short lived
http://profmattstrassler.com/articles-an...-what-are-they/So under a Quantum field theory your whole statement is misguided and/or wrong the correct field version he expresses as
Even to say a particle like an electron is a ripple purely in the electron field is an approximate statement, and sometimes the fact that it is not exactly true matters.
It turns out that since electrons carry electric charge, their very presence disturbs the electromagnetic field around them, and so electrons spend some of their time as a combination of two disturbances, one in in the electron field and one in the electromagnetic field. The disturbance in the electron field is not an electron particle, and the disturbance in the photon field is not a photon particle. However, the combination of the two is just such as to be a nice ripple, with a well-defined energy and momentum, and with an electron’s mass.
In itself the statement won't cause you any issue as a layman, until I point out you and your entire classical universe is therefore nothing more than resonant waves in the fields in spacetime. At which point you usually run for the door, you saw the movie Matrix and didn't like it
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So no quantum field theories dispose of classic physics and are very different to the concept of considering virtual particles as real (classical objects) and popping in and out of existence. You do that and then try to borrow calculations from QM field theory, and put simply you can't. You either accept your classical world is gone (IE we have a quantum universe) or rework your theory/ideas from scratch with classical objects and new classical calculations. You are not alone Bill G/Rede struggle a lot with the same issue.
Renormalization is the standard method of dealing with infinities in these calculations, but that is nothing more than the dubious practice of dividing “both sides” by infinity. As a non-mathematician I can do no more than acknowledge that renormalization seems to work, and is valuable in making progress, but how far can that progress go?
That is not what renormalization is but it probably isn't important if you get the message above about mixing different ideas.
Sorry for length I tried to shorten responses up as much as possible.
