Gravity as Flux: An Objectivist Epistemological Critique of Spacetime Curvature and a Mechanistic Push-Gravity Model This paper asks a question never satisfactorily answered: not how gravity is described, but why bodies are held to the earth by an actual mechanism. It argues in three movements. First, it sets out an epistemological standard — drawn from objectivist philosophy — under which a valid physical concept must be reachable by an unbroken chain of inference from observation, while neither floating free of any referent nor postulating multiple co-existing realities. Second, it argues that the interpretation of gravity as the curvature of a physically existing four-dimensional spacetime fails this standard: it reifies a mathematical formalism, and treats time, which is a measurement of change in one present reality, as a physical dimension. The mathematics of general relativity is accepted as a predictive instrument; only its ontological interpretation is contested. The paper further identifies a double standard in the historical rejection of Le Sage push-gravity: the heat-and-drag objection demands a complete mechanism of the push model while exempting the attractive model, which escapes the objection only by supplying no mechanism at all. Third, it explores a mechanistic alternative in which gravity is the refractive response of matter to an omnidirectional cosmic flux, propagating as light propagates through glass. The gravitational constant G is reinterpreted not as a fundamental constant but as the refractive index of matter for this flux, G = p·Φ·σ², which predicts a slight measurable anisotropy in G. The model recovers the inverse-square law from geometry, shares the mathematical form of the gravitational-wave equation without adopting its geometric ontology, and offers an account of several standing observations including the Allais and flyby anomalies. Its central open question — how matter acquires a refractive gradient strong enough to produce gravity yet requiring no net absorption and hence no heat — is stated plainly rather than concealed. Three falsifiable experiments are proposed: measurement of directional anisotropy in G, eclipse gravimetry, and weight screening of coherent-state materials. The author claims no proof, only an honest inquiry and a possible explanation.
Frank van der Eijden (Tue,) studied this question.