General Relativity Through the Ime Framework

Einstein’s paper of 1916, Die Grundlage der allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie, is the founding text of general relativity, and it is usually read as replacing physical space by geometry. We read it paragraph by paragraph, through its introduction, all 22 sections and its 16 footnotes, using the Info-Magneto-Electrostatic (IME) Cosmos framework, in which space is a plenum whose permittivity, permeability, tension and inertia are physical properties. Two theses are supported by Einstein’s own text and by measurement. First, a concentration of mass makes the space around it neither homogeneous nor isotropic. The paper denies that any choice of coordinates can make special relativity hold over a finite region containing a field, finds Euclidean geometry failing near a mass, and states that the field gives momentum and energy to matter. The GOCE satellite has mapped the unequal radial and transverse tidal gradients of the Earth, clocks carried to 10 000 km follow the dependence of the potential rather than the linear law of a uniform field, and the Cassini radar delay has measured the curvature of space near the Sun. Second, the space Einstein calls free of matter is not nothing. Its field has energy components that, in Einstein’s words, gravitate in the same way as every other kind of energy, a conclusion he made explicit at Leiden in 1920; gravitational waves, frame dragging and the constants of the vacuum measure it. A tetrad and Plebański’s constitutive medium translate every metric statement of the paper into a statement about the plenum. Given the IME locality index, with clocks and rods responding at its half power, the exterior of a static mass is the exponential metric. It reproduces the static weak-field tests of 1916 and of the Solar System: 1.751 seconds of arc of light bending at the Sun, 42.98 seconds of arc a century for Mercury and the gravitational redshift. Inserted into Einstein’s equations it requires an effective source whose energy density equals the Newtonian energy density of the field, , where is the locally measured acceleration of gravity; the source violates the null energy condition, and the IME framework reads it as the energy of the plenum held in tension about the mass rather than as an independent field. The metric departs from the Schwarzschild exterior at second order, by 0.730 microarcseconds in light bending at the solar limb and by 4.6 per cent in the critical impact parameter for the capture of light, a value that the Event Horizon Telescope’s measurement of Sagittarius A* neither excludes nor favours.