8.8 Mercury Perihelion Precession

This paper derives the Mercury perihelion precession from the electron ground-state vacuum perspective. The relative gradient is defined as the intrinsic driving force of geometric gravity, and is a purely geometric constant. The precession coefficient is an algebraic identity — the factor 3 comes from the second-order derivative structure of the three-dimensional matter-field space projection volume. The precession value is arcseconds per century, deviating from the observed arcseconds per century by less than . The orbital parameters , , and are currently temporary anchors from astronomical observation; complete closure requires subsequent work in the hierarchical scaling chapter.