Gravity
A dent in the medium, a slope, and a push on every Aetheron inside a body.
The push acts on every Aetheron inside the stone, one at a time. Nothing is watertight to the Aether: it fills a block of steel at the same density as it fills empty space. Mass is Aetheron count, so the force is push-per-Aetheron times count, and the count is the mass. That is why gravity goes by mass and not by size, and why a boat floats while a stone falls: water is excluded from a boat; the Aether is excluded from nothing.
The same count gives the inertia. Sixteen times the Aetherons means sixteen times the push and sixteen times the resistance, and the ratio is one. Everything falls together, and here that is division rather than an assumption.
An Aetheron is the particle the Aether is made of, and protons, neutrons and electrons are made of them too — matter is the medium, arranged. That is why a kilogram of anything holds the same count.
None of this disagrees with Newton or Einstein. The same fall, the same orbits, the same bending of light. What changes is the layer underneath: a pressure difference in a medium, rather than a curve in geometry that nothing is said to be made of.
Written out, the steps produce Newton’s law and say what its constant is made of: G is the dent one kilogram makes at one metre, divided by the density of an Aetheron. Every unit in G points at a property of the medium. What is not yet done is to calculate the dent from the medium rather than read it from G. That needs the force between two Aetherons, and this series has its shape but not yet its strength.
What this memo does and does not do
It sets out gravity as a pressure slope in a medium acting on every Aetheron inside a body, and derives from that the inverse-square law, the proportionality to both masses, the equivalence principle, and the form of G as a ratio of two Aether properties.
It agrees with Newton and with Einstein on every number. Same fall, same orbit, same bending of light. What it changes is what is underneath — a pressure difference in a medium rather than a curve in geometry.
Draft. A working draft, published for scrutiny rather than as a settled result.
This memo is about the force. How fast things fall, what clocks do near mass, and what happens at the extreme are other memos. What is set out here is what pushes, what it pushes on, and why the push comes out as it does.
1. Objects Are Pushed, Not Pulled
The ocean a fish does not know it is in
A fish lives under pressure and inside a medium. Every part of it is pressed on from every side, all the time, by the weight of the water above. It does not feel this, because it has never been anywhere else and has nothing to compare it with. The pressure is simply the condition of being a fish.
We are the fish, and the Aether is the ocean. We are under pressure and inside a medium, and we notice neither, for the same reason. Deep space, far from any mass, is where that pressure sits at its natural level.
What we do notice is gravity. We feel it constantly and have never been able to say what it is. It presses on us every moment of our lives — and from that we concluded that the Earth must be pulling, and that the planets must be pulled. Nothing has ever been seen doing the pulling.
Put a mass into the ocean and the pressure around it drops a little. The drop is tiny against the baseline, but it has a slope, and a slope pushes. The push that holds you to the ground is not coming out of the Earth. It is coming from deep space — the full weight of the ocean above you, pressing down toward the slight hollow the Earth has made in it.
Which is why space does not need to curve
The standard account explains gravity by saying that mass bends the shape of space and time. A falling stone is taking the straightest path through a bent shape. The bending is real in the equations, and nobody has said what is doing it or what it is made of.
On this account nothing bends. Space is the room the Aether sits in, and a room has no properties to bend. What changes near a mass is the pressure of what fills it. The stone is not following a curve through geometry. It is being pushed downhill through a medium, by the medium.
The same measurements come out either way — the same fall, the same orbit, the same bending of light. One account has a mechanism you can point at. The other has a shape with nothing underneath it.
To be clearNothing here disagrees with Newton or Einstein
This is not a rival to the two accounts of gravity that already work. It uses their equations and gets their answers.
The force between two masses, proportional to both and falling as one over distance squared — identical. The rate everything falls, the same for all objects whatever they are made of — identical. Orbits, tides, the return of comets — identical. Light bending near the Sun, and the delay of a radio signal passing it — identical, and that a medium reproduces those exactly has been established since 1923 and is not in dispute.
What is different is the layer underneath. Newton gave the law and said plainly that he would not guess at its cause. Einstein gave the cause as a bending of space and time — and that bending is described, never explained. Nothing in the standard account says what bends, or what it is made of, or why mass should bend it.
This memo fills that layer and leaves everything above it alone. Mass lowers the pressure of a medium that is already everywhere, and the slope of that pressure pushes. The equations do not change, because they were never wrong. They were incomplete.
Nothing reaches out from the Earth and takes hold of a dropped stone. There is no cable, no hook, no attraction. The stone is pushed — from behind, toward the ground — by something that was already there before it was let go.
That something is the Aether. All of space is full of it, at one pressure — and at that one pressure it does nothing. Uniform Aether has no slope anywhere in it, so it pushes nothing in any direction. It is the flat sea, and a flat sea moves nothing.
What makes a dent is Aether compressed — which is to say, matter. A mass sitting in the medium lowers The result is a dent: a region where the pressure is below the deep-space baseline, deepest at the mass and rising back toward baseline with distance.
The picture in one paragraph
A stone in the air sits on the slope of the Earth’s dent. The Aether pressing on its top is very slightly higher than the Aether pressing on its bottom, because the top is a little further from the Earth, where the dent is a little shallower. That difference pushes it down. The stone falls because the pressure above it is greater than the pressure below.
2. The Dent
The dent has two properties that go together, and both are measured facts about gravity restated as facts about a medium.
| Property | How it goes | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Depth | One over the distance | Twice as far away, half as deep. Never zero — the dent reaches everywhere. |
| Slope | One over the distance squared | Twice as far away, a quarter as steep. This is the measured law of gravity — the inverse-square law — read as a slope. |
The two are not separate. A dent that falls as one over distance has sides that fall as one over distance squared — the slope is the rate at which the depth changes. That is why the inverse-square law and the well go together in every account of gravity.
And both scale with the mass. Twice the mass, twice the depth, twice the slope. A heavier body makes a bigger dent.
What the slope is, in ordinary terms
Pressure changes with distance from the mass — so many pascals for every metre you move toward it. That rate is the gradient. It is steepest close in and gentlest far out, and it is the same for every object at a given spot, because it belongs to the dent and not to the object.
3. What The Slope Pushes On
Here is the step that decides whether the account works at all.
A pressure difference across an object normally gives a force that depends on the object’s size. That is why a cork and a lead ball of the same size feel the same push in water: the water presses on the outside, and the outside is the same. It is called buoyancy, and it goes by volume.
But gravity goes by mass. A cork and a lead ball fall at the same rate, and the lead one needs eleven times the force to do it. Whatever is pushing is not pushing on the outside.
What an Aetheron is
An Aetheron is the single particle the Aether is made of — one size, one mass, the same everywhere. Everything else is made of them. A proton is Aetherons, packed and turning. So is a neutron, and so is an electron. Matter is not a different kind of stuff sitting in the medium; it is the medium, arranged.
That is why mass can be a count. A kilogram of anything — lead, feathers, water — holds the same number of Aetherons, because that is what a kilogram is.
Set out in memo T.4, which describes the medium, and memo T.6, which describes how Aetherons are assembled into atoms.
The resolutionThe Aether is inside everything
Nothing is watertight to the Aether. Take a block of steel: it is mostly empty room with atoms in it, and the Aether fills that room at the same density as it fills empty space. There is no excluded volume, so there is nothing for the outside pressure to press against as a whole.
The atoms themselves are Aether too — compressed, which is what makes them matter rather than medium. So a block of steel is ordinary Aether with dense lumps of it scattered through. Both feel the slope, and both are counted.
The slope acts on every Aetheron inside the object, one at a time. Each has a pressure difference across its own width. Each is pushed by its own small amount. The force on the object is the force on one Aetheron, times how many there are.
The slope in question is the one made by the other mass, not by the object itself. An object’s own dent pushes its own parts in every direction equally and they cancel — the same reason the Earth does not pull on itself. Only the outside slope is left.
And how many there are is the mass. On this account mass is Aetheron count. So the force is push-per-Aetheron times count, and the count is the mass. The force goes by mass because it is counted in the same units as mass.
Why a boat is the exception, and why it proves the rule
A boat floats because water is excluded from it. The hull keeps a volume of water out, and the water presses on the hull’s outside. Punch a hole and the exclusion ends — water fills the space, there is nothing left to press on, and the boat sinks.
Medium outside an object: force goes by volume, and it floats. Medium inside: force goes by count, and it falls. A sinking boat is the moment one becomes the other. The Aether is always the second case, because nothing can keep it out.
4. Why Everything Falls Together
Gold weighs sixteen times what carbon does, atom for atom. Drop one of each and they land together. Why does the heavier one not fall faster?
Because the same count does two jobs. A gold atom has sixteen times the Aetherons, so it gets sixteen times the push. It also has sixteen times the mass, so it is sixteen times harder to move. Divide one by the other and you get one. Same fall.
The trolley
Two shopping trolleys, one with ten bags in it and one with a hundred. Push the handle and the heavy one moves off a tenth as fast. But put a hand on every bag and push each one the same — now the heavy trolley gets ten times the push and has ten times the mass, and both move off together.
Gravity is the second kind of push. It does not act on the handle. It reaches inside and pushes every Aetheron separately. Add a piece and you add one unit of push and one unit of weight. The ratio never changes, whatever you build.
This is the fact the standard account calls the equivalence principle — that the mass which resists being pushed and the mass that gravity pulls on are the same thing. Newton used it. Einstein took it as a starting assumption — something accepted without proof — and built general relativity on it. Neither said why it should be true. Here it needs no assumption. It is division by the same number.
5. The Force On One Aetheron
An Aetheron is a small sphere sitting in the slope of the dent. The face pointing away from the mass is at slightly higher pressure than the face pointing toward it. That difference, over the face, is the force.
| Step | What | How |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | The pressure difference across it | The gradient, times the Aetheron’s width |
| 2 | The area it acts on | The Aetheron’s face, a circle of its radius |
| 3 | The force | Difference times area — then two thirds of that, because a sphere’s angled sides catch less than a flat disc of the same width |
Why that comes out as a volume
The pressure acts on the face — that much is plain. But the force is not the pressure on one face; it is the difference between the two. So the sum needs the face area and how far apart the faces are:
force = (gradient × width) × area
And a width times an area is a volume. Nothing new has entered — it is the area calculation carried through, with the width included because that is the distance over which the pressure changes.
Put together, the force on one Aetheron is the gradient times the Aetheron’s volume. That is exact for any sphere in any pressure gradient. It is the rule Archimedes found in his bath, in its general form, and it is why a balloon rises by exactly the weight of the air it pushes aside.
Then the force on a body is that, times the number of Aetherons in it.
6. The Equation
The steps above, written out, produce Newton’s law — and say what the constant in it is made of.
| Symbol | Name | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| ∇P | the gradient | how fast the pressure changes with distance, at a place |
| D | dent per kilogram | the gradient one kilogram produces at one metre — a property of the Aether |
| M, m | source mass, body mass | the one making the dent, the one being pushed |
| r | distance | between them |
| Va, ma | Aetheron volume, Aetheron mass | — |
| ρa | Aetheron density | ma ÷ Va |
The derivationFive lines
The gradient at distance r from mass M: ∇P = D M / r²
The force on one Aetheron: f = ∇P × Va
The force on the body: F = (m / ma) × f = (m / ma) × D M / r² × Va
Sort it: F = [ D Va / ma ] × M m / r²
Compare with Newton, F = G M m / r². The bracket is G, and Va / ma is one over the density:
G = D / ρa
The gravitational constant is the dent one kilogram makes at one metre, divided by the density of an Aetheron. Every part of G points at a property of the medium — the Aetheron’s volume, its mass, and how much the Aether gives when a mass sits in it. Nothing in it is a bare number.
The working example — one kilogram at the Earth’s surface
Three inputs, then seven steps of arithmetic.
| Inputs | ||
|---|---|---|
| Weight of one kilogram | F | 9.81 N |
| Gradient at the surface | ∇P | 11.9 Pa/m |
| Aetheron mass, upper limit | ma | 3.86 × 10−77 kg |
| Step | Working | Result |
|---|---|---|
| 1 Aetherons in the kilogram | N = 1 kg ÷ ma = 1 ÷ 3.86 × 10−77 |
2.59 × 1076 |
| 2 Force on one Aetheron | f = F ÷ N = 9.81 ÷ 2.59 × 1076 |
3.79 × 10−76 N |
| 3 Its volume, from the force | Va = f ÷ ∇P = 3.79 × 10−76 ÷ 11.9 |
3.18 × 10−77 m³ |
| 4 Its radius | R = (3 Va ÷ 4π)⅓ = (7.60 × 10−78)⅓ |
1.97 × 10−26 m |
| 5 Its face area | A = π R² = π × (1.97 × 10−26)² |
1.21 × 10−51 m² |
| 6 Pressure difference across it | ΔP = ∇P × 2R = 11.9 × 3.93 × 10−26 |
4.68 × 10−25 Pa |
| 7 Check: force from area and difference | f = ΔP × A × ⅔ = 4.68 × 10−25 × 1.21 × 10−51 × ⅔ |
3.79 × 10−76 N ✓ |
| What follows | ||
|---|---|---|
| Aetheron density | ρa = ma ÷ Va | 1.21 kg/m³ — about air |
| Dent per kilogram | D = ∇P × r² ÷ M = 11.9 × (6.371 × 106)² ÷ 5.972 × 1024 | 8.09 × 10−11 |
| And G — a check, not a result | G = D ÷ ρa = 8.09 × 10−11 ÷ 1.21 | 6.68 × 10−11 measured 6.674 × 10−11 |
Read the last row carefully. It returns G to within rounding — but it was always going to, because the gradient in the inputs was itself worked out from G. That row is a check that the arithmetic is self-consistent. It is not a measurement of anything, and it is not evidence.
What the chain does show is that the mechanism holds together: step 7 returns the force we started from, and every quantity has a place. What it does not show is why G has the value it has. That would need the dent to come from the Aether rather than from G, which is section 10.
7. Why Gravity Is Weak
Two people standing a metre apart attract each other with about the weight of a speck of dust. The whole Earth, pulling on you with everything it has, produces a force you can overcome by standing up. Gravity is the feeblest thing in physics, and the standard account has no reason why.
On this account the reason is in the arithmetic. The force on one Aetheron is the gradient times its volume. The gradient at the Earth’s surface is about twelve pascals per metre — and the Aether around us sits at a baseline pressure many orders of magnitude above that. The Earth lowers it by a fraction so small that the slope is barely there. A planet is a scratch on the medium.
What makes the force noticeable at all is the count. Twelve pascals per metre acting on one Aetheron is nothing. Acting on 1076 of them at once, it is your weight.
8. Two Things That Are Not True
The push does not drag. The historical account of gravity as a push — Le Sage, 1748 — had it as a hail of particles streaming in from all directions, with bodies shadowing each other. It died because a stream that can push you can also slow you, and the Earth would have spiralled into the Sun. This is not that. The push here is a standing pressure difference, not a stream of anything. Nothing flows past and nothing arrives. A diver at depth is under enormous pressure and feels no drag standing still.
The dent does not take time to form, and nothing has to soak in. The Aether is already inside every object, at all times. It did not have to get past anything. When a mass moves, the dent moves with it as a wave, at the speed waves travel in the Aether. That was confirmed in 2017: a gravity signal and a light signal from the same distant event arrived together after 130 million years, to one part in 1015.
Why Cavendish was slow
In 1798 Henry Cavendish hung two lead balls near two steel ones and watched the steel drift. The drift took twenty minutes per swing, and it is easy to think the force was slow to arrive.
It was not. The force between his balls was 1.5 × 10−7 newtons — the weight of fifteen nanograms — acting on a ball weighing three quarters of a kilogram. That is a small force on a large mass, and it takes a hundred seconds to move a millimetre. The dent was already there. The instrument was slow.
9. What This Does And Does Not Do
It does give a mechanism. A slope in a medium, acting on every particle inside a body. It produces the inverse-square law, the proportionality to both masses, and the fact that everything falls together — the last of these derived rather than assumed.
It does say what G is: the dent per kilogram over the Aetheron density. A ratio of two properties of the medium, with every unit accounted for.
It does not yet produce the number. The dent per kilogram was read from the measured value of G, not calculated from the medium. To calculate it needs the force between two Aetherons — the long faint tail of the potential this series proposes — and that is not yet fixed. When it is, G becomes a prediction, and it either comes out at 6.674 × 10−11 or the mechanism is wrong.
The shape of the dent — falling as one over distance — is taken here as the measured fact it is. A separate memo — T.7, on the Aether flowing toward mass — supplies that shape from conservation laws rather than assuming it.
10. How The Equation Could Be Confirmed
As it stands, G = D ÷ ρa is a statement about what the constant is made of, not a calculation of its value. The dent per kilogram is worked out from the measured G, so putting it back returns G. That is a rearrangement, and it should not be mistaken for a prediction.
What is not a rearrangement is the form. That G must come out as a dent-per-kilogram divided by a density is forced by the mechanism — a different mechanism would give a different combination. Whether this one is right is what the following would settle. Four ways, in order of how close this series is to each.
| Method | What it needs | What it would show |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Calculate the dent from the Aether | The force between two Aetherons, as a function of how far apart they are. From that, work out how much one kilogram of them lowers the pressure around itself. | The dent per kilogram, from the medium alone, with no gravity used. Divide by the Aetheron density. If it gives 6.674 × 10−11, the account is confirmed. If not, it is wrong. This is a calculation, not an experiment. |
| 2. Pin the Aetheron density another way | The density from something that is not gravity — how tightly the Aetherons pack, how light of different colours travels, or how the vacuum responds to a very strong magnet. Each depends on how the Aether is built, not on how it pulls. | Two independent routes to the same density would hold the equation together. Two that disagree would break it. |
| 3. Read the slope directly | An instrument that measures the Aether’s pressure slope near a mass. None exists. Light comes closest — it bends and slows near the Sun, and that is the dent being read — but the standard interpretation of those measurements already contains G. | A slope measured without going through gravity, put into the equation with the known density, gives G with nothing borrowed. The cleanest test, and the furthest off. |
| 4. Find where the two accounts differ | A medium has a state of rest; a bent geometry does not. A medium made of pieces spreads the shortest wavelengths; a geometry does not. A medium can be squeezed; a geometry cannot. | Any of these found would not give G, but it would show the medium is there — and then this is the right equation to be solving. |
Which one to pursue
The first. It is the same piece of work the rest of this series is waiting on. Fix the force between two Aetherons and four things follow from the one result: the value of G, the size of an Aetheron, the limit on how much the medium spreads light, and the strength of the vacuum’s response to a magnet. One number, four predictions.
The second is half done. Working from how tightly the Aetherons must pack gives a density of about 1.2 kilograms per cubic metre, and working back from gravity gives the same. But both currently rest on the same assumption about the spacing, so they are not yet independent of each other.
The third and fourth are experiments, and nobody has designed them.
11. The Numbers
In summary, the figures behind the argument:
- The gradient at the Earth’s surface: about 12 pascals per metre.
- Aetherons in a kilogram: 2.6 × 1076.
- Force on one, at the surface: 3.8 × 10−76 newtons.
- Aetheron radius, upper limit: 2.0 × 10−26 metres — ten billion times the smallest length physics has a name for, and ten billion times smaller than a proton.
- Aetheron density: 1.2 kilograms per cubic metre — about that of air.
- Test of composition-independence: to one part in 1015.
- Cavendish’s force: 1.5 × 10−7 newtons, the weight of fifteen nanograms.
12. Terms Used Here
| Word | What it means |
|---|---|
| Aether | The proposed substance filling all space: one kind of particle which light would travel through and which matter would be built from. Not an established entity. |
| Aetheron | The proposed single particle the Aether is made of. One size, one mass, identical everywhere. |
| Deep space | The Aether far from any matter, at its natural density of about 0.9 kg per cubic metre and its baseline pressure. |
Every term used across the series is on the terms page.
13. Sources
Reference codes read source.work.passage and resolve on the Master Source Register, which carries every source used across this series.
- I. Newton. Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687). The inverse-square law and the shell theorem. Carried as reported from secondary sources; the original has not been consulted.
- H. Cavendish. Experiments to Determine the Density of the Earth, Philosophical Transactions 88 (1798) 469. Carried as reported; not verified.
- G.-L. Le Sage. Lucrèce Newtonien (1782). The push-gravity account this memo departs from, and its standing objection. Carried as reported; not verified.
- B. P. Abbott et al. Gravitational Waves and Gamma-rays from a Binary Neutron Star Merger: GW170817 and GRB 170817A, Astrophysical Journal Letters 848 (2017) L13. The speed of gravity. Carried as reported; not verified.
- P. Touboul et al. MICROSCOPE Mission: Final Results of the Test of the Equivalence Principle, Physical Review Letters 129 (2022) 121102. Composition-independence to 10−15. Carried as reported; not verified.
- On the force on a sphere in a pressure gradient: standard fluid mechanics, and the general form of Archimedes’ principle. Uncontested; not individually sourced.
Verification register: references 1 to 5 are carried as reported and none has been checked against an original. The Aetheron figures in sections 6 and 10 are computed in this series from the limit on how closely Aetherons can be packed and from the bulk density, both of which are open. The gradient of 11.9 Pa/m is derived from the measured value of G and is not independent of it.