What Is Gravity? Redefining Gravity in the Era of Information Physics: From Force to Geometry to Information Curvature

This paper addresses the source-level meaning problem left open after Einstein’s general relativity and the earlier black-hole Record-Relay sequence. General relativity explains how stress-energy curves spacetime, while the Record-Relay papers developed black-hole boundary accounting, delayed ringdown coordinates, and detector-facing gravitational-wave constraints. But one question remained unresolved: if the Einstein field equation is preserved, what is the physical meaning of the stress-energy source once physical information is treated as energy-bearing thermodynamic structure?

The paper develops a general-relativity-preserving source reinterpretation of gravity. The central claim is not that general relativity is replaced, nor that gravity becomes a new force. Instead, the paper asks whether the same stress-energy tensor that already sources curvature can be read as condensed physical information-energy. In this usage, “condensed” means compact, physically instantiated, energy-bearing information, not a microscopic Bose-Einstein condensate and not semantic or abstract information.

Three main results anchor the paper. First, the ordinary Einstein equation and standard gravitational-wave sector are preserved by construction: the framework changes the source-level interpretation, not the field dynamics. Second, the black-hole sector supplies nontrivial closure: a single horizon information coordinate organizes the information-temperature scale, horizon radius, horizon area, and scrambling delay. Third, the measured-data layer shows that the resulting information-curvature coordinates remain physical, percent-scale, and late relative to ordinary ringdown across 100 GWTC H1 remnants, while the delayed sector remains undetected and bounded.

The mathematical layer is intentionally conservative. The paper does not derive the gravitational constant, the speed of light, or the Einstein coupling from information alone. It does not claim that semantic, mental, abstract, or disembodied information gravitates. A scalar information amount does not generate the full stress-energy tensor. Instead, the tensorial source structure — energy density, pressure, momentum flux, and anisotropic stress — is inherited from the ordinary stress-energy tensor and re-expressed in information-energy language.

The black-hole sector is where the reinterpretation becomes more than a change of notation. In stationary black-hole thermodynamics, the marginal energy cost of horizon information is fixed by the Hawking temperature scale. In the Schwarzschild branch, the same horizon information coordinate determines the horizon radius, horizon area, and scrambling delay. The originality of the paper therefore lies not in a symbolic relabeling of stress-energy, but in the cross-sector closure of thermodynamic, geometric, and dynamical horizon quantities through one physical information coordinate.

The formation-dynamics layer is also bounded. The logistic equation is not proposed as a replacement for Newtonian gravity, the inverse-square law, or the Einstein field equation. It appears only as the minimal leading form for how a normalized information-curvature coupling channel forms and saturates under bounded, seed-dependent, and remaining-capacity-dependent conditions. In other words, logistic dynamics describes coupling formation, not spatial gravitational falloff.

The detector-facing layer is separated into three evidential levels. The first level is algebraic waveform preservation, which is necessary but not empirical evidence. The second level is measured-remnant coordinate stability: across 100 H1 remnants, the information-curvature coordinates remain physical, percent-scale, and well separated from ordinary ringdown. The third level is the imported Paper 25 H1 null result: no delayed secondary burst is detected, and strong delayed-sector amplitudes are constrained.

The quantitative result is therefore not a proof from gravitational-wave data, but a measured-data consistency ledger. The 100-event H1 audit shows stable percent-scale coordinates, physical delayed times, and large late-burst separation relative to the primary ringdown. The delayed sector is not claimed as detected. The correct conclusion is consistency and constraint, not discovery or empirical confirmation of a new gravitational signal.

The paper also explains why the next decisive gravitational-wave test cannot simply be another H1 phase-marginalized power stack. Because the leading mass dependence nearly cancels in the delayed coordinate, the remaining detector-facing uncertainty is dominated by remnant spin. A future coherent search therefore requires sharper event-by-event spin information, posterior propagation over remnant mass and spin, and network-level or next-generation detector analysis, plausibly in the Einstein Telescope and Cosmic Explorer era.

The conclusion is that gravity remains geometry, but the source of that geometry can acquire a precise physical-information meaning. Paper 26 reframes gravity as the curvature response of spacetime to condensed physical information-energy while preserving general relativity and all ordinary correspondence limits. It provides a source-level reinterpretation, a black-hole information-closure bundle, a bounded formation law, a measured H1 consistency ledger, a delayed-sector null bound, and a reproducibility package. It explicitly does not claim a replacement of general relativity, a new force, semantic-information gravity, a detected delayed burst, or a proof from gravitational-wave data.

Keywords: gravity, general relativity, information physics, stress-energy tensor, information-energy, source reinterpretation, information curvature, black-hole thermodynamics, Bekenstein-Hawking entropy, Hawking temperature, horizon information, information radius, scrambling delay, gravitational waves, GWTC, H1 strain, ringdown, record-relay, logistic dynamics, measured-remnant consistency, detector-facing bound.