The Density-Gradient Law of Gravitation: Gravity as the Logarithmic Gradient of Ether Plenum Density, and the Derivation of Mercury's Precession From the Density Gradient Alone, Without Spacetime Curvature

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.

Rearranging the hydrostatic condition, and substituting the equation-of-state parameter forced by the traceless stress-energy of a massless field, gives the gravitational acceleration as one third of the squared speed of light times the gradient of the logarithm of density. The expression contains no masses, no separation, no gravitational constant, which is what the central claim requires: gravitation is a local property of the Plenum a body occupies rather than a relation between distant bodies. It recovers Newton's inverse-square law exactly, satisfies Poisson's equation in vacuum and at a source, and makes superposition a property of the logarithm. That expression is the law: gravitation is a reading a body takes where it stands, of how sharply the Plenum thickens there, and nothing in the reading points to any other body.

The second result closes the gap the first opens. Because the density-gradient law returns Newtonian acceleration exactly at every radius, a body obeying it alone would trace a closed ellipse and Mercury's perihelion would not advance. A body in the compressed Plenum ages at the local clock rate and is limited by the local signal speed. Extremizing the elapsed proper time yields three post-Newtonian corrections, three, minus one half and one half, summing to the coefficient the precession requires. The advance comes out at 42.98 arcseconds per century against an observed residual consistent with zero, at minus two plus or minus three milliarcseconds per century, with no metric and no field equations.

Two bodies are needed and two suffice, the compression one body leaves in the Plenum and the other's motion through it, and a binary pulsar shows the advance at thirty-five thousand times Mercury's rate.

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.