QGD / MPDT and General Relativity: The Aberration Problem, Compared

Abstract

Newton's instantaneous gravity was abandoned because it appeared incompatible with a finite speed limit and with the empirical fact that orbits do not destabilize under aberration. General relativity resolves this through velocity-dependent terms, forced by general covariance, that cancel the naive retardation almost exactly (Carlip, 2000), so that a finite-speed theory reproduces, at leading order, the present-location tracking a genuinely instantaneous interaction produces directly. This paper compares the derivational apparatus each theory needs to reach that shared result. Quantum-Geometry Dynamics (QGD) reaches it directly from two axioms and one derived equation; general relativity reaches it through an interlocking stack of structural commitments. The paper argues this is a genuine parsimony asymmetry that extends into the quantitative regime — QGD's outstanding quantitative predictions await empirical grounding of its constants, not additional theory — and traces general relativity's extra apparatus to two imports, the mathematical continuum and physical time, independently diagnosed elsewhere in the QGD/MPDT portfolio as recurring sources of pathology. It concludes that general relativity's apparatus effectively recovers true instantaneity at the order governing present-location tracking, and diverges from it exactly where genuine, currently open empirical work remains.