Dear Eckard,
You said "It happens that even the wildest guess comes close. So I will try and add one more horrible speculation: Abelian and non-abelian? I read that Abel died in a duel when he was a young man, and Christian Felix Klein was at best a baby at that time. Perhaps, Abel's symmetry was a simple one. Non-abelian sounds to a layman like me a bit like non-Euclidean, non-Newtonian, transfinite, ueberabzaehlbar, hyperreal, superluminal, postmodern, and other once excitingly modern notions."
Consider the Standard Model: SU(3)xU(1)xSU(2). SU(2) and SU(3) are considered non-Abelian because their mediating bosons can interact with one another. For instance, couplings between the W and Z exist. We even speculate on the possibility of glue-balls because three gluons could theoretically couple to one another in such a manner as to yield a net color of white. On the other hand, the U(1) of Weak hypercharge represents Electromagnetism, which is Abelian and its mediating boson, the photon, does not interact with itself at tree level (although we do have radiative corrections of order the fine-structure constant squared and smaller caused by ghost loop electrons).
Gravity is a paradox. On one hand, gravity is an inverse-radius-squared force with "infinite" range - as is Electromagnetism, and so we might expect gravity to have an Abelian nature. On the other hand, the theoretical graviton quanta interacts with mass, mass interacts with curvature, and curvature interacts with gravity, which seems non-Abelian. Perhaps the characteristics that we call "Gravity" are two different forces. I think that Edwin Klingman would be pleased with that idea...
I travelled this week and got behind on this blog site. Hopefully, I can read your essay next week.
Have Fun!
Dr. Cosmic Ray