Emergence and the Swampland Conjectures

The Ooguri-Vafa Swampland Conjectures claim that in any consistent theory of quantum gravity, when venturing to large distances in scalar field space, a tower of particles will become light at a rate that is exponential in the field space distance. We provide a novel viewpoint on this claim: if we assume that a tower of states becomes light near a particular point in field space, and we further demand that loop corrections drive both gravity and the scalar to strong coupling at a common energy scale, then the requirement that the particles become light exponentially fast in the field-space distance in Planck units follows automatically. Furthermore, the same assumption of a common strong-coupling scale for scalar fields and gravitons implies that when a scalar field evolves over a super-Planckian distance, the average particle mass changes by an amount of order the cutoff energy. This supports earlier suggestions that significantly super-Planckian excursions in field space cannot be described within a single effective field theory. We comment on the relationship of our results to the Weak Gravity Conjecture.