Gravitation as the Absence of Pressure from the Direction of Energy

Abstract

We start from one property of energy: it has a propensity to occupy space not already occupied by energy. Energy presses into the available space around it, and available space presses back; this returned press, arriving at any packet of energy from every direction in which there is available space, is the pressure of space. Where energy already lies, the space is taken and no pressure comes from that direction. A packet of energy is therefore pushed from everywhere except from the direction of other energy, and moves toward it. Gravitation is not an attraction; it is the absence, from the direction of energy, of the pressure of space. We model this literally: the push arriving from each direction is reduced in proportion to the energy lying along that line of sight, and integrating the push over all directions gives, with no law postulated, Poisson's equation with energy density as source and the inverse-square law. The same integral shows that the space between any two bodies pushes them apart, which is a cosmological constant Λ = 4πκ/v₀ equal to the drive constant of the principle. Without reference to mass the model yields the universality of free fall, the gravitation of all energy, gravitational redshift and time dilation, and the weight of binding energy. Because all energy is light-like, the pressure of space is one third of the energy density of occupied space by the kinetic theory of radiation, P₀ = Λc⁴/12πG ≈ 3.5 × 10⁻¹⁰ Pa. The missing pressure acts on a photon twice, as a push and as a slowing of its passage through space where pressure is deficient; requiring the two descriptions of its speed to agree fixes the second with no free coefficient and predicts the deflection of starlight to be 4GM/bc², the observed 1.75″, for every photon regardless of its energy, and γ = 1. Matter moves on geodesics of the resulting effective metric, giving Mercury's perihelion advance of 42.98″ per century by direct calculation. Occupancy is graded by compactness, so only collapsed objects fully occupy their space. The dynamics follow from the same line-of-sight integral taken at retarded time, and from the fact that a moving unit of light-like energy presses along its motion, so that occupancy is directional for energy in motion. The pressure deficit becomes a symmetric tensor whose trace and drag components are constrained rather than radiated, because the compressional response of space does not propagate, and whose transverse-traceless part propagates at c as anisotropic bunching of space with two polarizations. Energy–momentum conservation then gives the quadrupole formula, the orbital decay of the binary pulsar, and frame dragging. At linear order the theory coincides with linearized general relativity and supplies a physical reading of each of its components; beyond linear order it differs, predicting an exactly constant vacuum term and no event horizons, and its consistent nonlinear completion is the open problem.