In Place of a Pull, a Gravitational Field

A pull, whether by gravity or suction, may be adequate as a figure of speech for everyday use, but wholly unsuited to science as being subjective. Lacking proof, Newton himself lost confidence in his theory, and privately began speculating whether Hooke's universal 'flux' might have been right after all, even if he still claimed to 'make no hypothesis'. Initially it had appeared too radical a departure from Aristotle's classical explanation of it, but weight is not inherent since in free fall a body is weightless. It has been measured since remote antiquity by comparison with arbitrary standards when held at rest, by traders and scientists alike.

Despite its name, Newton's law of gravity says nothing about this, nor about the force itself, but just the acceleration caused by it in free fall, and stated mathematically based on a special case. Hooke had described the physics of the force of gravity in the general case as the loss of equilibrium between two bodies as the result of their mutual shielding from a universal force. This was the basis of the 'shadow theory' that LeSage advanced two and a half centuries ago, which has been argued over, on and off, ever since by many of the great names in physics. Its revival comes amid theories of a gravitational field populating all of space, and not exclusively gravitational but multifunctional, generated by the energy missing from Newton's theory of a gravitational pull. The long-sought Unified Field Theory presupposes a common source of energy driving a range of essential functions.