A History of Gravity: Forty-Five Answers to Why Anything Has Weight, From Aristotle to Now

The Theory of NeoGravity states a physical cause for gravitation. Space is not an empty void; it is filled, everywhere, by the Ether Plenum. Every body gives off radiation without pause — the Sun, the Earth, a stone in the hand — most of it invisible, across the whole spectrum from radio waves to gamma rays. That radiation carries momentum outward, into the Plenum. The Plenum returns it, inward, on the body that sent it out; Newton’s third law allows nothing else. That returned load is gravity, the Radiative Undertow. It is compressive, so the Plenum settles denser toward a mass, and a body falls by answering to the state of the Plenum where it is. Nothing acts across empty space. In this account the curvature of a four-dimensional spacetime metric describes the Plenum’s settled profile and does not cause it: Newton’s potential, Einstein’s metric and the gravitational field are three names for one state of the Ether Plenum under load.

Forty-five recorded answers to why anything has weight run from Aristotle's doctrine of natural place in the fourth century BCE to the quantum-gravity programs running now. Each carries who was responsible, what they published, and what the attempt added. What the record teaches binds the Theory of NeoGravity as hard as any of the other forty-four: being in the minority says nothing about whether an answer is right, and reproducing a known number says nothing about whether the cause proposed for it is the cause.

Three of the forty-five are mainstream today, and all three began as minority positions argued against a skeptical majority: universal gravitation, general relativity and gauge field theory were each contested in their time. Paul Gerber obtained Mercury's forty-three-arcsecond perihelion advance in 1898, seventeen years before general relativity produced the same expression, from a derivation later judged unsound and a theory that bends starlight by half again too much. George Birkhoff's 1943 flat-spacetime theory reproduced several relativistic predictions before it was shown to require the speed of sound in matter to equal the speed of light. A minority position is not thereby wrong, and a recovered number is not evidence of the cause proposed for it.

Five statements say what the Ether Plenum is. They are set down before any result, in one place, so that nothing can be slipped in afterwards to rescue a number that comes out wrong; that is their purpose, and the reader is entitled to hold the theory to it.

The first two say nothing that is not already true of water, or of steel, or of air. The Plenum is neither created nor destroyed; and when it is pushed, it moves. Any physicist would grant those two of any material at all, and they cost the theory nothing. It is the three that follow that commit it. Squeeze the Plenum and it presses back, with exactly one third of the energy it holds; and that fraction is not chosen but forced, because whatever fills it has no mass. Twist it and it answers as a fluid does that remembers, for a moment, having been a solid: stiff against a quick disturbance, yielding to a slow one. And a body holds the Plenum about it denser than it is far away, by an amount fixed by the body’s mass; matter and Plenum trade momentum through that and through nothing else.

This, then, is all the theory asks of its reader: five statements about the Ether Plenum, and no more. Everything else in the forty papers is drawn from those five, and where a step remains to be taken, the paper names it. Where the theory agrees with Newton and with Einstein it says so, and in the weak field, where nearly all the testing has been done, it cannot be told apart from either. Where it differs from them it names the measurement that would settle the matter, and where a proposal of its own has failed, the failure is kept in print beside the results, with the arithmetic that undid it. The theory is new, and it is the work of one independent researcher; these forty papers are its case, made as fully as the evidence allows. Every number in them is recomputed by a verification program that anyone may download and run: https://github.com/worldlibrary-hub/NeoGravity.