Smolin's (et-al) paper is consistent with my theory of emergent gravity based on the local gauging of the de Sitter group and macro-quantum vacuum coherence with a relation between the gravity frame (tetrad) fields and the strong gluon fields. Smolin's model is mathematically more sophisticated and he gets interesting relations between all the important coupling bare constants which, however, do not agree with observations. He then handwaves about renormalization of the bare quantities. Nevertheless, it is an interesting attempt.
"All physical constants – including Newton’s constant, the cosmological constant, the Yang-Mills coupling and Higgs parameters – derive solely from g and the Higgs vev. The relations obtained are clearly far from observed values, which might suggest that the model considered here is too simple to have phenomenological applications. However, before drawing such a pessimistic conclusion, we should note that these are bare parameters, so gY2 M refers to the single coupling constant of the unified gauge group at the Planck scale, and similarly for the cosmological constant. It is then not impossible that these equalities hold in the neighborhood of a fixed point that governs the asymptotic high energy behavior of the unified theory. The fact that the gravitational and Yang-Mills couplings are explicitly related is a sign that we are dealing with a genuine unification of gravity and Yang-Mills theory."
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