How does gravity happen? How do separated particles or masses accelerate each other selfward? How does momentum get to and/or from particles in this acceleration? I believe that answers to these questions can be found in properties and actions of a medium that fills all space, which was and still should be named aether.
After all of my musings about gravity and after writing this little essay, I've come believe that the truth is to be found in this YouTube talk.
Gravity mechanisms
1) One view holds that space is filled with (ie aether contains) momentum-bearing corpuscles or wavelets that push matter particles in the direction of their translation or propagation as they are absorbed (possibly diverted) by those matter particles. Owing to this action, each matter particle is surrounded by a spherically divergent field of diminished corpuscle or wavelet traffic in the direction away from itself, hence a field of excess momentum toward itself. All particles in the universe would be accelerated toward that matter particle and analogously toward each other. Gravity is mutual. I spent some time considering the implications of this view.
2) Another view holds that particles consume, destroy or otherwise diminish adjacent escape potential (fugacity), resulting in a spherically divergent fugacity field, a fugacity gradient toward itself. Particles in such a gradient are accelerated toward lower fugacity, ie toward other particles, in a manner analogous to a proton experiencing an emf. Presumably a particle accelerated this way sends momentum-bearing wavelets (rocket-like) in the opposite (rearward, uphill) direction, momentum being a conserved quantity. This picture comes to mind when I attempt to understand General Relativity.
3) Another view holds that particles consume or destroy adjacent aether, thereby creating spherically divergent fields of selfward aether flow that wash particles toward each other. Here I'm attempting to convey the mechanism proposed by Distinti and others.
The reader is invited to critique, correct, refine and add to these generalizations (address: xmsdavidr@gmail.com).
Orbit features
General Relativity is a mathematical model that accounts for all observable orbits and all other gravity effects. My wavelet model by itself can’t account for the simplest of orbits, two equal masses alone in an otherwise massless universe. Not yet.
Perhaps something can be learned from two unequal masses alone in an otherwise massless universe.
Here we see some interesting locations between the masses – 1) the barycenter, c (center of gravity about which objects orbit, where fugacity is lower than elsewhere in the neighborhood) and 2) the fugacity saddle, s (where the two fields balance unstably and a test object would experience no gravity but would experience centrifugal force). There are several other interesting locations in the system called Lagrangian points, where lighter objects can settle stably and co-orbit around the barycenter with the main masses.
It seems that the masses are accelerated toward and orbit the barycenter as if that were the source of the centripetally accelerating field. It seems not to matter that the field everywhere is the sum of two gravity fields of masses that are moving and changing velocities. The system behaves as if an object’s fugacity field is instantly established and/or eternal, despite the constant centripetal acceleration of the masses toward each other and the barycenter. Perhaps the fields themselves are gravitationally accelerated as are the masses. This raises the question whether a mass’s field plays a role in its responses to other masses, contrary to Newton’s laws. I'm suggesting here that an object's gravity field responds to a neighbor's gravity field like light (as predicted by Einstein and observed by Eddington).
If you had no problem believing that two masses in an otherwise massless universe could orbit each other, then you tacitly agree that aether is, that aether sits or sloshes in an inertial frame of space. Without a reference frame there can be no orbit and no centrifugal force to balance the centripetal force of gravity. Moreover, the orbiting bodies must emit LIGO waves, losing kinetic energy (speed) to the aether; and they must gradually approach each other and merge – these two masses alone in an otherwise matterless universe.
Losing kinetic energy to the aether is tantamount to experiencing a headwind, as expected of the wavelet mechanism of gravity.
