Happy New Year!
I had this thought the other day. How does gravity influence spacetime? Gravity seems to be essentially analog, while spacetime seems to act as if it is digital. Then it hit me - gravity acts like an AM signal, which is rectified into FM spacetime.
The gravitic field varies continuously. It may be digital at a fine enough scale, but that matters very little for the purposes of the present discussion. What matters most is that gravity is expressed at every point as an amplitude. (There is also a directional component, but I'm ignoring that for now - it isn't relevant to the current topic.)
Spacetime varies in density, as if it were composed of spheres - or a frequency modulated signal, where each null (the center line between peaks and troughs) is a different point. If you think of spacetime as a field of waves, the frequency (inverse wavelength) corresponds to the density.
Gravity obviously affects spacetime - the higher the gravity, the more dense the spacetime. How is this accomplished? Gravity can be considered a form of energy. The higher the gravity, the more energy any given point of spacetime has to have. How does this happen? By increasing the local energy, spacetime reacts by incresing frequency. This shortens the wavelength, and forces individual points closer together - increasing the density of spacetime.
To summarize, the AM gravity signal is expressed as an FM signal in spacetime.
Which again raises the more fundamental question - what is the resting wavelength (frequency) of spacetime? Why is it that? It is obviously not 0 or 1, as the first increase in energy doesn't dramatically increase the density at that point. So it must be some relatively large number. But what is that number? And why is it that? What does it consist of?
This vacuum energy must exist. All behavior seems to depend upon it. If it is constant with time, then it means that the energy of the universe is not constant - as the universe grows, the amount of energy contained in it must grow in proportion. If it is even meaningful to talk about the expansion of the universe.
What does an expanding universe mean? If we speak only of matter, then it does seem to be expanding. If we speak of the furthest extent of the first photons, that is very similar, albeit a somewhat larger sphere. But gravity is essentially infinitely fast. (It is most certainly faster than light.) There is no gravitic expansion of the universe, because the gravity is already there.
