To a curious mind, gravity is a curious phenomenon. The more one pays attention to it, the more fascinating and mysterious it becomes. Today, we have the advantage of having had great minds ponder the mystery and define what can be observed and inferred by studying it.

Newton pondered the question “why do objects fall?” and provided us with a theory of universal gravity (along with his three laws of motion). He essentially defined the terms we now use to describe and quantify gravity, the force that attracts objects with mass to each other.

A description—particularly an accurate mathematical description—of gravity is the beginning of an answer to the question, “How does gravity actually work?”

Newton’s theory of gravity gave us a grasp of the mechanics of motion, but until Einstein redefined our understanding of the relationship between space and time, and the relationship between mass and energy, changing our concept of gravity, we did not realize that there was a great deal more to the question.

Einstein’s theory of general relativity revealed an equivalence between the force of gravity and the force of acceleration, with fascinating implications for the relationship between those forces and inertia that gave us new insight into the impact of motion on time and space.

Einstein’s relativity introduced us to the concept of curved or warped space-time. At the same time, Einstein’s revelations provide a better description of the phenomenon of gravity while subtly undermining the concept of gravity. That is, it is less clear what gravity is (or what is gravity), specifically, and that makes it more difficult to comprehend how gravity works.

One of the things that makes gravity so difficult to pin down is the fact that it is inextricably linked to matter through mass, and through mass to space, time and energy; it reveals something profound about how space, time, matter and energy truly relate to each other. We just cannot, quite, see it.

We understand that gravity is defined as an inherent interaction between masses with a direct impact on the shape of space in which mass resides. Ironically, space in the form of distance dictates the strength of the force of gravity. The force of attraction between the mass of two objects is proportional to the inverse square of the distance between them.

We understand that energy is equivalent to mass times the square of the speed of light, C². But what does that actually mean? At the moment, we are looking at the same thing from many different perspectives, none of which provides a complete picture of the whole.

The descriptions have a way of losing sight of the query at the heart of the question. To answer “how does gravity actually work?” we have to stop and ask ourselves what we are really asking; when asking the question we need to consider what it is about gravity that is so mysterious. What is it about gravity that makes us wonder?

We have to return to the question Newton asked, “Why do objects fall?” Newton certainly refined the way we were looking at the problem, but we still need to ask ourselves, “What is this force?” or even more explicitly, “what is the mechanism of this force?”

There is something in the relationship between mass and energy that still bears examination. There is also something more to be understood about the relationship between gravity and other forces of motion, starting with acceleration or the transfer of kinetic energy to an object in opposition to gravity.

The answer might not come from asking about gravity at all. An interesting insight into the mechanism of gravity came to me through a series of observations about time. The idea was explored in a blog entry only a few days before I stumbled across the, “How does gravity actually work?” topic on Helium.

At the time, the blog was fresh in my mind and I posted it, without preparing potential readers for the leap my article asked them to make. Having been written in a moment of inspiration, it took a few days for the implications of what I had written to hit me.

I had intended to comment on some of the philosophical implications of simulating time, based on the stated observations and examples, but in the process stumbled onto a simulation of the effect of gravity. To share that epiphany, I have to direct you to Time in a Distributed, Process Driven, Information-based Universe.

That post was a product of typing as fast as I could to keep up with my thoughts. I realize that it jumps across points that are clear to me that may not be clear to others; and without outside comment I would not necessarily know what connections need to be spelled out, but to me, while writing this post, I seem to have stumbled upon a very simple explanation for how gravity might work.

To strip away all the speculation, the curvature of space-time used to describe gravity might simply be a consequence of the conservation of energy. I honestly do not know if this is a previously noted relationship; the conservation of energy is such a fundamental idea in physics it might simply be taken for granted, described accurately in the math but not commented on.

I simply present this as the line of thought that whimsy, and the synchronistic emergence of the writing prompt, brought to my attention, since I do not recall having encountered it elsewhere.

The quick and dirty translation of my underlying thoughts includes my conceptual understanding of spacetime as medium whose substance is energy, underlying and invested in the structure of space, with its static and graphic aspects, subject to dynamic and sequential distributed displacement, manifesting as time.

In this model of reality, energy becomes mass by acquiring structure, which behaves in accordance to static and dynamic principles—like distributed information processing—because, whether viewed as physical structure or information, the energy invested in all structures is constantly rebalancing.

It is simpler to just say that the gravitic effect implicit in a distributed process is a product of the conservation of energy, and it is possible that this is also true for real gravity.