On gravity, an experimental gap

v. 8 n. 6

There has always been something peculiar about gravity. As familiar as it seems, as in keeping everything from floating away, exactly why this containment occurs cannot be explained to full satisfaction to everyone who cares. Galileo was the first to realize that all bulk masses fall at the same rate. Newton didn't even try to explain why masses seemed to be attracted in a certain way with his "I make no hypothesis." Einstein said that the earth "curves space" near it and that is what keeps everything from floating off the surface. The latter implies that it is space itself that is doing the actual work, and not the earth; the earth -- matter -- is only one step before the action; space itself is somehow the actual effector -- the last to contact the particle and to provide locality. Space that has undergone some alteration is doing the actual holding of things down to the surface according to Einstein. This is still peculiar, though ... unless space is as ponderable as matter seems to be.

Then what is matter that it should do this curving to space?

In this EG thesis there is no fundamental distinction between matter and space. Matter is a form of space. Space that is curved tightly enough and "phase-locked" into place, so that it might only appear independent of space. This is why there is no mass-energy term in θ=-κ∇^2 S. In this view, the earth is concentrated space. Since the driver is entropy, S, in this relation, and is expressed at large as accelerated universal expansion, θ, interspersed here and there by plateaus or contractions of entropy -- which is a way of saying that expansion is not uniform -- any plateau or contraction or matter formation is not governed principally by the gravitational parameter, G; rather G is contingent on S, which may vary, implying that G may vary.

If the earth is thought of as initially just uniform space, then if over a large volume little sections of the volume are pictured as separated and curved or compressed onto matter, resulting in gaseous material, this material takes up less "room" in a manner of speaking. Then eventually the compressed gas, earth, is at the bottom of an entropy gradient, that can no longer be compressed; it is a local entropy maximum in an ocean of ever-increasing entropy.

The difference between this type of curvature and that of general relativity is that the earth is not distinct from space. The earth IS space in a compressed form, and the rest of space notices the "absence" of part of its original self by "trying to fill the gap." This is a reason why there is a second derivative on the right of the θ-equation (∇^2 or Laplacian); from the scalar S, taking the first derivative suggests a velocity and the second suggests an acceleration, which is what is happening to space; space is trying to accelerate into the gap caused by the absence of part of itself that formed the earth, so to speak.

It is not gravity (an attractive effect) that is behind this, rather that the earth is a passive lump and the universe is trying to expand into the earth from all sides. The apparent attractive effect (local entropy maximum) is permitted because entropy is increasing globally. Gravity as a local effect is permitted by entropy as a global effect. Mass is not independent. Energy is not independent. Gravity is not independent. Entropy, maxed-out locally and ever-increasing globally, is independent. Fundamental.

In this view, we are held to the earth by an effect from above rather than from below as Newton would have it, without explanation. The effect is not between the person and the earth; instead, between the person and space. The gravitational constant, G, is not seen as a coupling constant between particles, rather as a local measure of space expansion with respect to bulk matter. The physical coupling is between each individual particle (not bulk matter) and space, instead of conventionally between particle and particle. It has been contended that this could be evident by lepton-rich matter having greater gravitational mass than baryon-rich matter. This particle-space coupling is roughly common with general relativity regarding bulk matter, although, Einstein (Galileo and Newton) did not distinguish bulk matter from individual particle types, i.e., point-like and finite size. This experimental gap remains in physics because there has been no reason to explore it, until now. *

* Geometric reframing of the equivalence principle, Part 2: Quantifying | LinkedIn

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