How Can Objects Interact Without Touching? Imagining Mechanisms for Action at a Distance
Have you ever stopped to wonder how the Sun can tug on Earth from 93 million miles away—or how magnets can repel each other without ever touching? This strange phenomenon is called action at a distance, and it’s one of the most puzzling and profound features of nature. How can something "here" affect something "there" with nothing in between?
In this blog, I invite you to imagine with me several possible ways this kind of interaction might occur. Some explanations come from theology, some from modern physics, and others from alternative visions of how the universe works. After considering the strengths and weaknesses of each, we’ll explore a sixth possibility: that space itself is not empty at all, but filled with a physical medium—what I call gravium—through which forces are transmitted.
1. Divine Intervention
Description:
One possibility is that God directly causes objects to attract or repel according to the physical laws He has ordained. In this view, there is no hidden mechanism—just the immediate and sovereign action of the Creator.
Pros:
Aligns with a theistic worldview.
God is certainly capable of such action.
Provides a simple reason why the laws of nature work reliably.
Cons:
Offers no physical mechanism that can be tested or modeled.
Limits scientific inquiry by appealing directly to divine will.
Inconsistent with other natural observations: for example, the cell’s nanomachinery—DNA replication, molecular motors, energy storage—suggests that God’s laws are normally carried out through complex, discoverable mechanisms.
Most theistic scientists, myself included, assume God created laws that operate consistently through secondary causes, not by continuous intervention.
2. The Mathematical Universe
Description:
In this view, reality is fundamentally mathematical. The universe doesn’t need a medium or mechanism—forces and motion occur because the universe simply follows mathematical rules.
Pros:
Elegant and conceptually appealing.
Explains the remarkable success of mathematical models in predicting nature.
Cons:
Highly abstract—offers no insight into how math acts on matter.
Treats mathematical structures as if they are real physical causes.
Ignores the intuitive and historical expectation of a mechanism that links cause and effect.
3. Particle Exchange
Description:
According to quantum field theory, forces are transmitted by the exchange of virtual particles—for example, photons mediate the electromagnetic force, and hypothetical gravitons mediate gravity.
Pros:
Consistent with the Standard Model of particle physics.
Provides accurate predictions in quantum electrodynamics.
Cons:
Virtual particles are not real particles; they are mathematical artifacts used in calculations.
These exchanges presuppose the existence of fields or spacetime to support them.
It’s unclear how massless particles transmit force over empty space.
While particle exchange can suggest a repulsive force (like two people pushing against each other), it fails to explain attraction without invoking dubious concepts like negative momentum.
4. Quantum Vacuum Soup
Description:
This idea proposes that empty space is not really empty but filled with a seething "soup" of virtual particles constantly popping into and out of existence. These fluctuations are said to create observable forces.
Pros:
Some experimental support (e.g., the Casimir effect, where two metal plates in a vacuum are pulled together due to suppressed vacuum fluctuations between them).
Widely accepted in quantum field theory.
Cons:
No clear mechanism for producing directed, inverse-square forces like electromagnetism or gravity.
Highly speculative and difficult to test.
Virtual particles appear randomly. For the vacuum soup to produce the correct magnitude and direction of force between two charges or masses, it would have to “know”:
How far apart the objects are,
What their charges or masses are,
How much force to produce and in what direction.
This implies that either the vacuum is intelligently orchestrating its fluctuations, or that a hidden mechanism is guiding the behavior—neither of which is explained by standard theory. The idea that random, unstructured vacuum fluctuations produce precise, law-abiding forces strains plausibility and lacks explanatory power.
5. Gravity as an Illusion (Relativity)
Description:
In general relativity, a falling object is said to follow a natural path—a geodesic—through curved spacetime. From this viewpoint, the object experiences no force and no acceleration; it is in a local inertial frame, and an accelerometer attached to it would read zero. The person who dropped the ball, by contrast, is actually in an accelerated frame—held up by the ground—and their accelerometer reads 1g. This perspective treats gravity not as a true force but as a manifestation of spacetime curvature.
While this interpretation is mathematically self-consistent, it lacks a mechanism. General relativity describes how bodies move through spacetime, but not why all inertial frames near Earth are curved inward. The downward acceleration is simply assumed due to the equations, with no physical agent or cause driving it.
By contrast, in a mechanical view—such as gravium theory—gravity is a true force that acts directly on all matter, causing real acceleration. An accelerometer in free fall reads zero not because no force is acting, but because all the atoms in the device are being pulled equally, leaving no internal stress to detect. It’s similar to trying to determine the mass of an object on a balance beam scale in space: the mechanism can't register a difference because both sides are equally affected.
Pros:
Supported by many experimental observations, such as light bending around the sun.
Provides a mathematically consistent model of gravity.
Cons:
Offers no physical mechanism for how mass curves spacetime or why spacetime should have physical properties.
Merely reinterprets the force—it doesn’t explain how it arises.
The nature of space itself remains undefined. What is it that curves? What is being stretched or distorted?
The equivalence principle, a foundation of general relativity, is refuted by GPS systems, as explained in detail in Chapter 1 of Action at a Distance.
Do you really believe that gravity is just an illusion?
6. A Physical Medium (Gravium)
Description:
In this model, objects exert forces by distorting a rigid, invisible medium called gravium. These distortions store elastic potential energy in the medium. Particles with charge or mass move in response to gradients in distortion, seeking to minimize the stored energy. This results in attraction or repulsion, depending on the type of distortion.
Pros:
Provides a mechanical explanation of action at a distance.
Offers a framework that could unify gravity and electromagnetism under one medium.
Intuitively compatible with classical notions of force transmission through a medium (like sound through air or waves on water).
Cons:
Requires a new conception of space as a substance rather than a void.
Must be rigorously tested against experimental results (e.g., time dilation, gravitational lensing).
Challenges current mainstream models and will face intellectual resistance, even if it's more physically intuitive.
Conclusion
Each explanation for action at a distance reflects a worldview and a set of assumptions. Some approaches eliminate the need for a mechanism entirely, relying instead on abstraction or geometry. Others appeal to the mysterious quantum vacuum, which, upon closer inspection, offers little in the way of directional, law-governed causality.
But if we are seeking a coherent, mechanical, and intelligible explanation—one that aligns with the rest of nature’s complexity and discoverability—then the idea of a physical medium is worth serious consideration. Gravium theory offers a model that is both conceptually grounded and physically motivated.
Perhaps it’s time to take it seriously.
✅ Next Steps
Purchase the book: Action at a Distance, A Unification of Gravity and Electromagnetism
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—Eugene Eddlemon