  We argue that there is a spontaneously broken rotational symmetry between
space-time coordinates and gauge theoretical phases. The dilatonic mode acts as
the massive Higgs boson, whose vacuum expectation value determines the gauge
couplings. This mechanism requires that the quadratic divergences, or tadpoles
of the three gauge-theory couplings, unify at a certain scale. We verify this
statement, and find that this occurs at \Lambda_u ~ 4x10^7 GeV. The tadpole
cancellation condition, together with the dilaton self-energy, fixes the value
of the unified tadpole coefficient to be 1/[4 ln(\Lambda_cut/\Lambda_u)]. The
observed values of the coupling constants at \Lambda_u then implies \Lambda_cut
~ 4x10^18 GeV, which is close to the value of the reduced Planck mass
MR_Pl=M_Pl/sqrt(8 pi)=2.4 x 10^18 GeV. In other words, by assuming a cutoff at
M_Pl or MR_Pl, we are able to obtain predictions for the gauge couplings which
agree with the true values to within a few percent. It turns out that this
symmetry breaking can only take place if mass is generated with the aid of some
other means such as electroweak symmetry breaking. Assuming dynamical symmetry
breaking originating at MR_Pl, we obtain M_chi ~ 10^9 GeV, which is not
unreasonable but somewhat higher than \Lambda_u. The cancellation of an anomaly
in the dilaton self-energy requires that the number of fermionic generations
equals three.
