The harmonic background paradigm, or why gravity is attractive

Abstract In a work by Visser, Bassett and Liberati (VBL) (Nucl Phys B Proc Suppl 88:267, 2000) a relation was suggested between a null energy condition and the censorship of superluminal behaviour. Their result was soon challenged by Gao and Wald (Class Quantum Grav 17:4999, 2000) who argued that this relation is gauge dependent and therefore not appropriate to find such connections. In this paper, we clear up this controversy by showing that both papers are correct but need to be interpreted in distinct paradigms. In this context, we introduce a new paradigm to interpret gravitational phenomena, which we call the Harmonic Background Paradigm. This harmonic background paradigm starts from the idea that there exists a more fundamental background causality provided by a flat spacetime geometry. One of the consequences of this paradigm is that the VBL relation can provide an explanation of why gravity is attractive in all standard weak-field situations.