The journal Nature recently published an article by Davit Toms on the gravitational contribution to the running of electric charge. This got picked up by the press branch of Nature and I ended up being interviewed and quoted in the subsequent article in NatureNews. (Here is a pdf version in case the link does not work.) As can be noted, I feel that the calculation is mis-interpreted. Some of the reasons are mentioned in my paper with Mohamed and Mohamed, described in the previous post. There are possibly other reasons also. I fear that Toms, and others folks using a cutoff regularization recently, are mistaking the quadratic cutoff dependence of the coupling – which is completely unphysical – with the running of the coupling. This worry is supported by other work, some also by Toms, which finds no running in dimensional regularization. Physics cannot depend on the regularization scheme, and it is easy to understand why a quadratic dependence on the cutoff drops out when treated properly. In any case, this will be an interesting debate in the literature. In the end, I feel that the idea of gravitational corrections to running couplings is wrong.