I asked my father that question when I was five years old. My father answered that gravity was a property of matter, that the reason something fell was that it was small in size compared to the size of the Earth. It's hard to be skeptical of the statement that gravity is a property of matter because it is a universal belief, more universal than any religious belief. Because falling objects are a universal experience in our lives, and because we can't go through life without having an explanation for falling objects, we simply answer the question, "What is gravity?" with a meme, a mindless rote statement that is ingrained into our minds as if it were a physical part of our us.
At five, though, being a skeptic is easy, and I said, "No, I don't think so." to which my father replied, "Well, believe what you want."
I didn't want to believe anything, I wanted to know what gravity is, and I spent the better part of the next half a century piecing known facts of reality together to produce a mechanism that drives atoms toward the surface of the Earth in the measurable way that gravity does.
There are certain basic requirements that a mechanical explanation for gravity has to meet. When Kepler suggested that there was something about the sun that produced gravity, he was unaware that the planets, which merely reflected light, were hot and were therefore also emitters. His speculation failed for its inability to explain what the sun and the planets had in common that could produce gravity. This is a basic requirement for a mechanical explanation for gravity, that it apply to both stars and planets.
Then there are the measurable requirements. Objects that fall in the gravitational field of the Earth allow us to measure gravity and that measurement is that it is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from its source. Another measurable feature of gravity is that objects made up of different elements fall at the same rate when gravity is allowed to act freely, but all move with different rates when forced to move against gravity.
This aspect of gravity produces weight, and because we tend to measure weight as a property, rather than the effect of gravity on the matter resisting movement against it, we see weight as a property like gravity itself. The weight of elements is not a part of the elements, but rather the result of gravity's action on the atoms that make up the elements. The atom was conceptualized as containing neutrons in its nucleus, with the number of neutrons increasing with the element, increasing the element's weight. For a mechanical explanation of gravity to explain weight, we can use the concept of the neutron, but we have to realize that the mechanism of gravity works on the individual neutrons. Thus, when an object falls in a gravitational field, the force that holds the neutrons together does not act, and all neutrons fall at the same rate, allowing all elements to fall at the same rate. However, when the elements are moved against gravity, the force that holds the neutrons together does act, and all neutrons in the nucleus have to move at the same time. Thus, the more neutrons a nucleus contains, the more force required to move the atom against the gravity, and this produces the weight we use scales to measure.
Another feature of gravity that is ignored is that its existence has to be accounted for between its source and its effect. Today, we believe that, because gravity is a property of matter, it doesn't exist between its source and its effect. This means that when gravity doesn't do anything, it diminishes, but when it does do something, it doesn't diminish, an idea that violates everything we know about reality. Any mechanical explanation for gravity has to put gravity as a physical property of our existence, something that surrounds us, and indeed, travels through us.
Finally, because gravity is the most irresistible force in our existence, it is constantly holding us to the surface of the Earth and it is constantly causing us to grow tired when we move, and drop and break things when we are clumsy, because we have to expend massive amounts of money to produce the energy that runs the technologies we use to overcome gravity, the massive production machines and the planes, trains and automobiles that make up our prosperity, gravity has to be explained as a dynamic force, something that is doing something. Mindlessly repeating what we learned when we learned how to walk, that gravity is not a dynamic force, but rather a property, like color and hardness, and yes, weight, are properties, is no reason to accept a nondynamic explanation for a dynamic force. Mindless acceptance denotes belief rather than rational analysis and has no relation to the reality encompassed in the word science, the attempt to explain the reality in which we exist. In addition, mindless acceptance is childish!
The toolkit of physical effects we need to construct a mechanism that would operate to move the neutrons in the nuclei of atoms back in the direction of the source of the dynamic force of gravity can, in our state of empirical delusion, be divided into easily measured, but universally ignored facts and unexamined assumptions. Foremost among the former is a measurement noted by Kepler's mentor and victim, Tycho Brahe. Brahe is on record as noting that light measured out the same as gravity measured out, that both diminished inversely with the square of their distance from the source. Like Kepler's perhaps not so original notion that there was something about the sun that produced gravity, Brahe had nowhere to go with the measurement. Electricity, and especially inductance, were future discoveries, and without a more complete picture of physical reality, the overlapping measurements seemed nothing more than a coincidence.
Another physical fact that falls in the accepted, but ignored category, is that not only does light diminish inversely with the square of its distance, a mathematical function of the measurement of the increasing spheres light defines as it expands, it expands uniformly. This is probably the biggest clue to gravity because for light to expand uniformly, it has to have a mechanism that regulates its expansion, and, if such a mechanism would also cause the neutrons of atoms to be drawn back into mechanisms of ever increasing strength, then we would have a mechanical explanation for gravity.
Induction is another well known, if misconceived fact of reality. A flow of electrons produces a secondary flow of electrons at right angles to the original flow. The basic characteristics of this secondary flow are that it is proportional to the primary flow and when there are multiple flows, the inductive flows will combine and in the process, combine the primary flows.
These are the factual tools we have in our toolkit to construct the mechanism of gravity, However, any use of these tools faces two ill-conceived, but widely held beliefs about reality. Because of the timing of the discovery of electricity, the nature of light was codified into law without knowledge of inductance. Thus, when Young performed his two-slit experiment, in which light expanding from the same source was split, overexpanded and then recombined, with the resulting light collected on a screen showing light and the absence of light, the empirical elite jumped at the preconceived conclusion that light was like a water wave spreading out through a made-up aether. Without the knowledge of inductance, Young's experiment was not seen for what it was, the inductances associated with light recombining the overexpanded light.
Even had electricity and inductance been on the table, it would have been difficult to equate the two because electricity has a clear charge while light does not. However, factual investigation has subsequently overwhelmingly revealed that light is made up of electrons. Hot, light producing filaments seethe with electric and magnetic currents, the sun's surface seethes with electric and magnetic currents, when the Michelson Morley experiment proved there was no aether, Maxwell's notion of light as part of the electromagnetic spectrum was revealed and when Einstein's photoelectric effect became mainstream technology, all the sophisticated explanations in the world couldn't avoid the fact that light is being converted to electricity.
The reason that a charge in light can't directly be measured is not because light is diffuse in comparison to electricity, but rather that the inductive flows associated with the flow of light are proportional to the flows, and thus neutralize the charge of the flows. Light, then, becomes just a small segment of the electromagnetic spectrum, and nature produces the electromagnetic spectrum as a result of cooling, the sun burning, the Earth's molten core, which is not so far beneath our feet, and the cooling-off cores of the other planets in the solar system.
This leads to the second ill-conceived but widely held belief, that light is not made up of what gives it off. This is more a blind assumption than anything else. Why, when something burned, it wouldn't give up part of itself in light, is unexplainable. This blind spot in empirical science results in the stupidities of quantum mechanics (an ironic use of the term mechanics) where light is produced by electrons in the atom changing orbit rather than simply by the atom giving up its electrons. Seeing the reality of fire, it is hard to escape the fact that the electromagnetic spectrum being produced in the process of burning, which is actually the process of cooling from an ignition point, is made up of the electrons that hold the atoms of the elements that make up burning matter together. As the electrons depart, the elements of the burning material break down into their component elements.
Finally, to figure out what the mechanism of gravity is, we have to go back to our original fact, that something that produces such a dynamic force has to itself by a dynamic force. What is the only thing in the universe that is dynamic? The process of cooling, of course. It wasn't until the last half of the last century, and late into that last half at that, that empirical science realized that the Earth was hot, and it still hasn't dawned on this vast empire of ignorance that when something is hot, it emits the electromagnetic spectrum. But that is what it does. The objects that make up the solar system were all hot at one time, hot in the sense of being obvious emitters like the sun, but because space is basically cold, and heat moves downhill, where down is from hot to cold, the planets have crusted over (except perhaps for Jupiter's red spot) and the heat has receded beneath the surface.
Nonetheless, we live in an electromagnetic field produced by the cooling Earth and that field, like radio waves, invisibly passes through our bodies. Using visible light as a guide, we know that the electromagnetic spectrum, produced by a receding ball of heat beneath the surface of the Earth, expands in every direction and thus, it not only mathematically describes gravity as diminishing inversely with the square of its distance from the source, dropping objects in the field and measuring their rate of fall produce the same result. And because light diminishes uniformly, the electromagnetic spectrum also diminishes uniformly and thus requires a mechanism that regulates its expansion.
Looking closely at the results of Young's experiment, and knowing that light is made up of flows of electrons that produce inductive flows, we can construct such a mechanism. As the electromagnetic spectrum expands, it has infinite space in which to expand. However, it doesn't. It expands uniformly. However, this doesn't mean that it doesn't attempt to expand into infinite space. The expansion of light is a process of the flows of light overexpanding, then being recombined by their associated inductive flows, only, as they move forward at some one hundred and eight-six thousand miles a second, to overexpand once again. At any point in the expanding sphere of light, the light is overexpanding and being recombined by its associated inductive flows. The strength of the inductive flows is proportional to the primary flows, and the primary flows are precise, having diminished inversely with the square of their distance from the source.
Because the force of the inductive flows recombining the overexpanding light is equal to the primary flows, the force of recombination is also inversely proportional to the distance from the source. To visualize the mechanism that recombines overexpanding light, and thus regulates its flow and the flow of the entire electromagnetic spectrum so that it appears to expand uniformly, spread the four fingers of each hand and then intermingle them at the second knuckle, otherwise called the middle knuckle, the first knuckle from the knuckle joints that connect your fingers to your hand. Because light flows, and thus the electromagnetic flows will be recombined from the weakest to the strongest point as a result of the intersections, represented by the tops of the fingers, created by the overexpanded flows as they intermingle with one another, the recombining will occur back toward the source of the electromagnetic emissions. To see this effect, move your palms toward each other. A pocket forms as the fingers close together, and this pocket forms from the middle knuckles to the base of your fingers.
The mechanism that recombines overexpanded electromagnetic flows, then, is like a cone with its point away from the source of emission. The inductive flows collapse this cone from the point down until the flows are recombined into a single flow. In Young's experiment, when the screen captures the light, it is capturing this process, with the areas of no light the gaps between the areas of light out of which the overexpanded flows have been recombined.
When a neutron is caught in a collapsing cone, it is pushed in the direction the cone is collapsing, back toward the source of emissions. When the cone collapses, the neutron is immediately caught by another collapsing cone because the mechanism that regulates the expansion of light is found at every point in its expansion. The recombining force of the new cone is proportional to the strength of the primary flow, and thus its strength is inversely proportional to the distance from its source. As it collapses, the neutron is pushed back toward the source of electromagnetic emission, picked up by another collapsing cone and pushed back further, the process continuing until a force comes between the force of the recombining mechanism and the neutron that counters its force, a force such as the solid surface of the Earth.
Thus, as long as an object is falling without resistance in an expanding electromagnetic field of force, all neutrons, no matter how many of them are tied together into the nuclei of the atoms, will fall at the same rate and the atoms, no matter how many neutrons are tied together in their nuclei, and no matter how many atoms themselves are tied together by electrons to make up the molecules of solid matter, will also fall at the same rate.
However, when the matter encounters a surface that counters the force of the recombining mechanisms, a solid surface held together by the forces of the atoms that produce solid matter, and come to a halt, can move no further, then the question of the force holding the neutrons together in the nuclei of different atoms comes into play. If a nucleus has only ten neutrons held together in its nucleus, then it requires the force it takes to move ten neutrons to lift it. However, if there are twenty neutrons held together in the center of the nucleus, then it takes twice as much force to move against the recombining mechanisms because twice as many neutrons have to be moved at the same time.
Thus, weight, the mechanism of gravity, and the mechanism that regulates the uniform expansion of light, the electromagnetic spectrum, are all tied into a neat bundle which an accurate examination of Young's two-slit experiment reveals.
Peter Bros is the author of the 9 volume Copernican Series and is President of The Far Museum of Dallas, an actual history museum, which will house its collection of 50,000 rare Eastern Mediterranean manuscripts and artifacts together with actual history displays and tours in a full-sized replica of the Egyptian Temple at Dendera to be built in the Dallas Ft. Worth area. Email:peterbros@therealskeptic.com