Solar Sails and the Solar Wind: What Mainstream Physics Already Grants, and What It Does Not

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.

A windmill turns in air nobody sees, and the miller counts the turns and weighs the grain. Nearly everyone starts from the belief that space is empty. An engineer's handbook says otherwise. A radio transmitter has to be matched to the space in front of it at 376.7 ohms, and absence has no ohms. Sunlight alone has pushed a real spacecraft, IKAROS, measured in flight in 2010. And the Sun sheds about five billion kilograms of itself every second, as wind and as light.

Mainstream physics uses all of that every day and does not call the space a fluid; that step belongs to the Theory of NeoGravity alone. The sail's own arithmetic fixes the form the framework's gravity must take. A sheet lit equally from every side feels nothing, so a body's own light cannot be recoiling it; what drives a body is the unevenness of a squeeze in the Ether Plenum that is already standing still, not a stream arriving. That is why the objection that ended every earlier account of gravity, from Le Sage to Kelvin, does not reach this one: a stream heats what it lands on, and a standing squeeze heats nothing.

Sunlight pressure at the Earth's orbit is sixty trillion times too weak to be gravity, and points the wrong way, so what gravity answers to is a body's whole mass-energy, hot or cold. One candidate for what holds the squeeze in place comes out twenty-six orders of magnitude too small.

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.