In Plain Words

In the author’s prose voice.

Gravity is not a force that pulls on things. It is what keeps the pile from sliding. Coupling holds one grain to another. Gravity holds the whole record history in place, relative to itself and to every other record history. That is why gravity seems weak. It is not weak. It depends on all twenty-one ways a grain couples at once, and a thing that depends on twenty-one things is worth the product of them.

Cut the cable and you float. From inside you cannot tell whether you are falling toward a pile or drifting far from any. Stand on the floor and it pushes. From inside you cannot tell whether a pile below is pulling you down or a rocket is pushing you up. Those are the two halves of what Einstein called the equivalence principle. In sand they are one sentence: a site reads its own holding, and nothing past it. It stops being true when the site is big enough to lie across two slopes. Then it reads the difference. The picture says why: a site reads the landscape only by crossings, and a crossing inside one site is across the site’s own width.

Put a pile of sand between two places. Light goes round the pile. The crossing takes longer than it did before the pile landed. So distances change when mass lands. Not because anything moved. Because the landscape changed shape. A grain rolls on the landscape and cannot ignore the dent. The pile changes the slope. Far away, you call the change of slope curvature. Up close it is where the grain can go. What the picture does not yet say is which route the grain takes of all the routes, or why a clock deep in a dent counts slowly to someone outside. It names both. It does not derive them.

The source is what has landed. Mass, and everything the record holds as energy. A pile pulls the landscape down around itself. It does not fall into its own dent because the grains resist collapse. That resistance is coupling. The pull against it is gravity. Weight is that pull, felt against the resistance you are made of.

At the neck, before any grain has passed any gate, gravity and coupling are both fully there and neither has done anything. That is what I mean by one to one. It is not a number. After the grain lands, gravity has compounded over twenty-one gates and coupling over one. That is why one is twenty powers stronger than the other. Same grain. Two places.

How deep the dent is per grain landed is not this paper’s. AP08 derived the form of that years ago, and says plainly what it identified rather than derived. What is still owed is the other pull. The pull of what could land, pressing on the neck from the potential side. AP43 has its first form. The full form is owed. I would rather say all of that plainly than pretend.