March 30, 2026
Dude discovers ‘new gravity’ online
Show HN: Gravity doesn't track mass, it tracks waveform complexity
Internet rando rewrites gravity, asks if any physicists are free to chat
TLDR: An online poster claims gravity depends on how messy a signal looks over time rather than on mass, while openly admitting they haven’t spoken to any physicists. The community reacts with a mix of curiosity, skepticism, and jokes about DIY universe‑breaking theories, highlighting the tension between bold ideas and actual science.
A bold Hacker News poster rolled in with a wild claim: gravity doesn’t really care about mass, it cares about how “complicated” a signal is over time. The twist? When someone immediately asked, “Have you consulted any physicists?”, the author casually replied: “Nope, they’re surprisingly hard to get ahold of.” Cue the popcorn.
He then dropped a brainy explanation about “temporal accumulation,” basically saying: imagine watching a blurry, glitchy video through a tiny window and trying to guess the next frame. If remembering past frames helps, that’s what he’s measuring. According to him, for black holes you don’t need memory, but for gravitational waves—the ripples from colliding stars—you do, and that, not mass, explains gravity. The crowd’s reaction? A mix of “this is either genius or nonsense” with a heavy lean toward nonsense.
Commenters joked that this was classic “I solved physics in my living room” energy, complete with the missing step where you actually talk to real physicists. Others admitted the idea sounded cool but suspected it was more sci‑fi pitch than science. The whole thread felt like watching a very confident TED Talk collide head‑on with a very skeptical internet jury, live and unfiltered.
Key Points
- •Temporal accumulation is defined as allowing an observer to remember previous noisy snapshots of a signal to improve prediction of the next snapshot.
- •The persistence advantage P quantifies how much prediction error is reduced when an observer uses accumulated past snapshots versus only the most recent one.
- •For black hole shadows observed by the Event Horizon Telescope, the persistence advantage P is approximately zero because each snapshot already contains the full information needed.
- •For gravitational wave strain measured by LIGO, the persistence advantage P is large and positive because the waveform evolves over time and memory is essential for accurate prediction.
- •According to the described research, the factor determining how much memory helps is the spectral entropy (complexity) of the waveform, rather than the mass of the source.