The Eclipse Problem Reframed: Light Bending as Time Deformation in Rigid Space

The deflection of starlight observed during solar eclipses has long served as a critical test of General Relativity (GR). In the conventional framework, the effect arises from the joint contribution of temporal and spatial curvature, with the constants G and c entering explicitly at every stage of the calculation. In this work, we rederive the eclipse bending angle within the framework of Quantum Loop Chrono Dynamics (QLCD), where space is taken as non-deformable and all deformation is temporal. Working entirely in Planck units, the QLCD derivation eliminates dimensional constants: the bending angle follows from the stress–time deformation field alone, with G and c reappearing only when restoring to SI units for observational comparison. Despite the distinct ontology—curved spacetime in GR versus stress-driven time dilation in QLCD—both approaches yield the same numerical prediction of approximately 1.75 arcseconds for a grazing solar ray. This convergence underscores the empirical adequacy of QLCD while highlighting its structural simplicity and independence from calibration constants. The eclipse problem thus provides a clear case study of how QLCD reframes gravitational phenomena, not as spatial curvature but as a manifestation of temporal deformation alone.