GUILLE'S QUOTE: "... I have a strong problem with this idea. This is: where is mass? How is mass? Is it contained all around the matter, in each particle? If so, where is the mass distributed around each particle? In this ultimate question I'm a refugee of string theory, I hope, momentarilly. It's the only idea that gives me any hint of how mass could be."
This is a really good question (I'd say profound in a way). It seems to me that we'll have to go back and re-ask questions like "how is mass" and "what is time" to get anywhere in the quest for a TOE.
Let's put Einstein and relativity (both SR and GR) aside for a time and consider Paul Dirac's ideas.
In the 1920s Dirac tried to formulate a theory for the the space-time evolution of the electron, starting with Lorentz's work.
refer to this paper "Theory of the Electron" by for details:
www.philsoc.org/1962Spring/1526transcript.html
Dirac's results indicated that space and time were a "complex" mixture - the sum of a real and an imaginary quantity. see this article on Dirac:
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/print/726
Dirac also was willing to question theories which the physics establishment had already deemed as 'validated.' See pages 14 -24 of this paper, "Open or Closed? Dirac, Heisenberg, and the Relation between Classical and Quantum Mechanics", by Alisa Bokulich:
http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/arch...d-preprint.pdf
One intriguing comment by Dirac, on his attempts to unify quantum mechanics and special relativity, "This result las led me to doubt how fundamental the 4 dimensional requirement of physics is."
stevemc2