Does the force of gravity really exist, and where does its energy come from?
A Protestant emailer named Paul asks whether the so-called force of gravity actually exists, and if so where the energy for it comes from, and if not, what makes the heavenly bodies stay where they are.
Answer
I have a theory of gravity, laid out in my book A Googolplex of Tiny Black Holes, because nobody has figured out what gravity is, so I am entitled to give my proposal. It rests on a dictum: nothing does not exist. We look at the space between the Earth and the Moon or the Sun and think of it as empty, but that cannot be true, because the very definition of nothing means nothing is there, so space has to be something material, not ethereal. That something has to be the smallest divisible entity in nature, and quantum mechanics believes it has found that dimension at about ten to the minus thirty-five meters, twenty orders of magnitude smaller than the electron. That is the limit, because matter cannot be infinite in its largeness or its smallness. These smallest particles, which I call Planck particles or tiny black holes, fill every place in the universe, including the ninety-nine percent of the atom we call empty space, because nothing cannot exist there either. Now put a material body, made of atoms, into this plenum: the matter of that body displaces the Planck particles and creates a vacuum, a tension between the atomic particles and the plenum. A vacuum pulls, so the plenum, trying to reach equilibrium and unable to, pulls whatever bodies are out there inward, and that pulling is what we call gravity. That is why Newton's apple falls and why the Moon keeps its orbit.