Phenomena in gravitational fields are usually interpreted in terms of a fundamentally curved space-time. However, as proposed by several authors, one could adopt a different perspective: an effective curvature might also emerge, in some hydrodynamic limit, from distortions of the same physical, flat-space vacuum viewed as a form of quantum ether. To explore this idea, one could start by representing the physical vacuum as a Bose condensate of elementary quanta and look for vacuum excitations that, on a coarse grained scale, resemble the Newtonian potential U_N. By a rescaling of the basic spacetime units, it is then relatively easy to match the weak-field limit of classical General Relativity or of some of its possible variants. Here, I consider the possibility that U_N might originate from the far-infrared region of the physical, standard model vacuum.
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