On the Origin of Gravity: From "Space Exclusion" to "Vacuum Response"

This paper proposes a hypothetical mechanism for the origin of gravity: gravity can be viewed as the macroscopic manifestation of matter's perturbation of the quantum vacuum. This hypothesis consists of two levels: (1) At the effective description level, matter "excludes" the space it occupies, and the excluded space piles up to form geometric curvature—this provides an intuitive pictorial interpretation of general relativity; (2) At the microscopic mechanism level, this process corresponds to quantum vacuum polarization induced by matter, i.e., the non-uniform distribution of virtual particle pairs. We further propose that the rotation of celestial bodies plays a key role in this process—by breaking spherical symmetry, it transforms the isotropic local perturbation into a vacuum polarization structure with azimuthal dependence, whose gradient effect manifests as centripetal force. We tentatively name this framework the "Vacuum Response Gravity" (VRG) hypothesis. This paper aims to demonstrate the self-consistency and explanatory potential of this hypothesis through intuitive models, preliminary mathematical mapping, and comparisons with existing theories, noting its conceptual affinity with Sakharov's (1967) "induced gravity" while highlighting significant differences in mechanistic details.