The Anatomy of Equivalence: How a Medium That Grips Energy Makes Inertial and Gravitational Mass Equal, and the Trace It Leaves in Free Fall
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Every body falls with the same acceleration, whatever it is made of. Measured over four centuries with ever finer instruments, from Newton's pendulums to the MICROSCOPE satellite, the equality of inertial and gravitational mass now holds to a few parts in 1015, yet physics has treated it as an axiom rather than explained it. This paper explains it. We take space to be filled by a physical medium, the celestial plenum, and show that if the plenum grips each body at the electron boundary of its atoms in proportion to the energy the body contains and resists its acceleration by the same measure, the two masses are one quantity counted twice. We test six candidate couplings against the experiments and show that five of them, displaced volume, electron number, nucleon number and two measures of nuclear magnetism, are excluded by factors of 3 × 1011 to 5 × 1014, while coupling to energy survives exactly; we prove that this is the only coupling that makes free fall universal for every possible composition. We trace the anatomy of the atom that carries the grip: the plenum meets the electron envelope; the nucleus supplies almost all of the energy and, through the strength with which it holds its electrons, fixes the size of the envelope and so the density with which a moving atom presents its energy to the medium. The plenum's electrostatic action does not reach inside the nucleus, whose electric polarisability is a part in 1015 of the atom's, but its magnetic action does, through rotation. We give Huygens's idea of weight as the pressure of a medium circulating in every orientation an exact mathematical form that produces the inverse square push towards the centre and conserves the medium. Finally, we derive the one trace the medium must leave: a body falls faster than its energy alone would carry it by the ratio of the medium's density to its own. For the titanium and platinum alloys of MICROSCOPE this gives η = +1.56 × 10−15, within 1.1 standard deviations of the measurement, and for graphite against diamond, two forms of one element, +1.40 × 10−15, where every theory based on composition predicts about 10−24. A single experiment of one element can therefore decide whether space is a medium.
Author: Malik, Satinder Singh
Language: English
Subfield: Astronomy and Astrophysics
Field: Physics and Astronomy
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7221757080
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