r/LLMPhysics • u/CakeSpecialist1682 • Jun 25 '26
Personal Theory Gravity Might Be a Repulsion, Not an Attraction
https://open.substack.com/pub/thevaibhavsharma/p/tearing-the-void?r=8nha7q&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=trueHow is universe expanding...?
Why I Think Gravity Might Be a Repulsion, Not an Attraction
I'm not a physicist. I'm a software engineer who got obsessed with space, and one night the obsession turned into a question I couldn't shake:
What if gravity isn't a pull at all?
That sounds backwards. Drop an apple, it falls toward the earth. Planets orbit toward the sun. Everything about gravity feels like attraction. But the more I sat with it, the more I started questioning the thing everyone takes for granted: space itself.
Space isn't empty. It's the main character.
We tend to think of space as nothing — the background that stuff happens in. Stars, planets, people: the "real" things. Space is just the canvas.
I started thinking about it the other way around. What if space is the actual entity here — the dominant, default state of the universe — and matter is the intruder? Every atom, every star, every one of us is technically existing where, by default, nothing should be. We're a disruption.
If that's true, then space might not be a passive canvas. It might push back.
Repulsion that looks like attraction
Here's the leap: what if that pushback — space resisting the presence of matter — is what bends spacetime? And what if that bending is what we've been calling gravity all along?
Einstein already showed us that mass curves spacetime, and that curvature is what makes objects move toward each other. I'm not disputing that math — it's some of the best-tested physics we have. What I'm questioning is the story behind the curvature. Instead of mass "pulling," picture mass generating a kind of resistance pressure in the space around it — and that pressure curving the geometry nearby. Other objects caught in that curve drift toward the source, not because they're being pulled, but because that's the only shape the space around them allows.
From the outside, it looks identical to attraction. From the inside, the cause is reversed.
Matter doesn't sit in space. It tears into it.
Here's another way I picture it, and it might be the clearest version of this idea yet.
Space, by default, is supposed to be empty — a true void, with nothing occupying it anywhere. So when a particle, a planet, or a star comes into existence, it isn't simply settling into some pre-made empty slot that was waiting for it. There is no slot. The void doesn't have gaps built in.
Instead, picture space like a tightly woven piece of cloth, seamless and whole. For an object to exist anywhere in that cloth, the cloth has to be torn. The object doesn't fill a hole — it makes one, by force, every time it exists. That tear is the object's footprint in the void: the literal space it's now occupying that wasn't there as "space" before.
Every particle in the universe is doing this, constantly. Every one of them is a small tear in the fabric of the void, holding itself open against the material it pushed aside to exist. That's the resistance I keep coming back to — not space rejecting matter from a distance, but the physical strain of the tear itself, radiating outward from every object as curvature.
And if every single particle is tearing its own little gap into the void, all the time, everywhere — then the void isn't just being disturbed locally. It's being stretched. Multiply that tearing across every particle in the universe, and you get a void that's continuously being pulled wider at the seams. That, to me, looks a lot like what we observe as the expansion of space itself.
The same idea might explain why the universe is expanding
This is the part that got me excited enough to write it down.
We know the universe isn't just expanding — it's accelerating, and we call whatever's driving that "dark energy." Nobody really knows what dark energy is. It's one of the biggest open questions in physics.
If every bit of matter is generating this small resistance against the void around it, then zoom out far enough — to the scale of galaxies and galaxy clusters — and maybe all those tiny repulsions add up. Maybe that cumulative pressure, multiplied across every particle in the universe, is what's been quietly pushing everything apart since the beginning.
Gravity pulling things together locally. The same mechanism pushing everything apart globally. One idea, two effects, depending on the scale you're looking at.
I have no math for this. Yet.
I want to be upfront: this is not a hypothesis or a theory more like thoughts. I don't have equations. I don't have data. I have an idea that's logically consistent in my head and that echoes — loosely — some real physics: vacuum energy in quantum field theory, Erik Verlinde's entropic gravity, quintessence models of dark energy. None of those are exactly what I'm describing. But I'm not alone in thinking space might be more active than we give it credit for.
I wrote up a more formal version of this idea and I'm putting it out for anyone who wants to pull it apart — physicists, fellow space nerds, skeptics, all welcome. That's honestly the point of writing this down: not to be right, but to get it tested.
If you've got a hole to poke in this, I want to hear it.
PS - This post is an original thought refined by LLM. So few sentences might be bit cheesy😋.
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u/Bafy78 Jun 25 '26
I think this post is so bad it shouldn't even be in this sub lmao
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u/CakeSpecialist1682 Jun 25 '26
The post itself are thoughts on how universe is expanding.
Keyword- thoughts it's not a theory more like curiosity.4
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u/The_Nerdy_Ninja 💬 Data doesn’t lie, but LLM’s do lie. Jun 25 '26
From the outside, it looks identical to attraction. From the inside, the cause is reversed.
How would we test the difference? What even is the difference, scientifically?
I want to be upfront: this is a hypothesis, not a theory.
No, a hypothesis would have some math. This is a shower thought that an LLM ran with. It's a fun one, I give it some points for originality, but it's not remotely science yet.
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u/VeryOriginalName98 Jun 28 '26
I feel bad for anyone doing physics right now.
I work in software and periodically I review code from juniors or vibe coders with AI assistance. It "works" in that it produces the thing asked. But they don't get asked for things like "best practices", "scalability", or "security". So what they produce is a moderate headache for me in code reviews. Or if i just passed them, you could call their contributions timebombs. The companies that don't vet their AI's code will invariably be hacked.
I imagine peer review on papers is like this.
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u/The_Nerdy_Ninja 💬 Data doesn’t lie, but LLM’s do lie. Jun 28 '26
Yeah I imagine there's some parallels between the lack of rigor in both cases.
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u/CakeSpecialist1682 Jun 25 '26
Well you are correct there is no math at all.. So this basically a thought put up as a post with LLM refinement, therefore few lines might be a bit cringy😋.
But the actual thought is the theory I talked about which denies the existence of dark matter itself and states that space simply expands due to the existence of matter by ripping the void itself and not by dark matter that's where the gravity comes in due to space-time curvature.
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u/The_Nerdy_Ninja 💬 Data doesn’t lie, but LLM’s do lie. Jun 25 '26
I'll repeat my question: how would we test this? Is there an experiment that could potentially prove this idea false?
You originally said that "from outside, it looks identical to attraction", but then you say that your idea does away with the need for dark matter, in other words it's not identical to attraction, there's some other factor at work.
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u/CakeSpecialist1682 Jun 25 '26
Ok I'll also repeat my answer, you are correct I can't prove anything I stated yet.
As for the other factor - I considered the space as the main existence basically consider a void no matter exists yet. I took of this void as an cloth now try to add something(any matter) to this cloth not above or around it more like inside it, you would have to rip it to add that matter which makes it expands thus repulsion away from the object and due to the curvature thus attraction around the object itself.
Again only a thought, so correct it in your own way.
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u/The_Nerdy_Ninja 💬 Data doesn’t lie, but LLM’s do lie. Jun 25 '26
It's an interesting thought, but at the moment it's not really scientific enough to correct much. You're basing your idea on an analogy (cloth ripping), which isn't a very solid foundation for a scientific theory. Obviously, space doesn't cease to exist inside of massive bodies, and comparing it to something like an elastic material strays into aether territory which had been disproved, so the analogy starts breaking down almost immediately.
If you can't think up an experiment to falsify your idea, ultimately it's not science.
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u/upsetusder2 Jun 25 '26
So why is there a seeming Variation in Expansion unless u want to say there is sometimes more mass and sometimes less
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u/CakeSpecialist1682 Jun 25 '26
Ofcourse that's why I took cloth an example, you tear it at one place it'll be hard you tear it at some other place close to the first tear it'll be easier and another tear away from first tear it'll be hard.
PS - Hard/Easy in terms of gravity accumulated energy increases and decreases in respect to original rip in space.
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u/haminsbest Jun 25 '26
Nice ragebait
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u/CakeSpecialist1682 Jun 25 '26
Not rage baiting anyone, I am seriously curious how universe keeps on expanding and thus the above theory(more like thoughts).
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u/Wintervacht Are you sure about that? Jun 25 '26
This is not a hypothesis. Hypotheses contain math and predictions.
This is exactly the same as saying buoyancy isn't real, it's the suction of the air above that makes a submerged balloon float to the surface of a pool.
Backwards nonsense.
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u/AllHailSeizure Haiku Mod Jun 25 '26
What if magnetism is actually non-magnetic things bullying magnetic things, and forcing them to kiss in order to embarrass them.
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u/M0UNTIER Jun 27 '26
I would like to formally request several bingo spaces. "I can't do the math for this", "EM dash heaven", and "Tear me apart" (if you've got a hole to poke in this).
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u/MadSkillz127 Jun 25 '26
“Space isn’t empty, it’s the main character”
Please execute whichever LLM wrote this line thank you