Energy-nonconserving Planck fluctuations and strong forces

On the basis of the recent demonstration that sources of the dual Riemann tensor are violations of local energy-momentum conservation, it is hypothesized that matter is subject to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle because of stochastic Planck-scale fluctuations in the Euclidean geometry of the vacuum. The identification of such singularities with unitons, whose masses are quantized in discrete units of the Planck mass, and also with the sources of “strong gravity,” is shown to lead to the correct strength, range, and duration of strong interactions. A vacuum-induced cosmological term, due to coupling of spin to space-time torsion, results in massive gravitons, with mass similar to the spin-2 mesons, and a Yukawa, rather than Newtonian, variation of the hadron gravitational potential, thus adding support to “strong gravity” theories of the strong force.