"Gravitons are nearly massless quantum particles travelling at 0 c."
That's somewhat of a misnomer, as they don't travel at all. Yet they're constantly being created and destroyed, every unit of
Plank time, which is 5.39121e-44 seconds.
The interesting thing about this unit of time is that it's the smallest divisible unit of time. Nothing, down to the smallest unit of of matter, or the smallest energy, does anything in any duration of time smaller than Plank time.
Furthermore, the furthest distance anything can go in Plank time is the
Plank length, which is 1.6e-35 meters. And the only unit of matter that can go Plank time in Plank length is the photon, which, coincidentally, happens to be the only "particle" that's the same for both matter and antimatter. This becomes important later. But as I mentioned before, the photon is neither a particle nor a wave (although exhibiting characteristics of both). Rather, it's a quantum packet of pure energy frozen in time.
Moreover, it's equivalent to any of the subatomic forces binding nucleons, but in released form. Depending upon which of those forces is released, and from where, will determine the quantum level of the photon.
These forces include:
1. The strong force binding quarks and gluons
2. The weak force affecting all left-handed leptons and quarks
3. The electric field surrounding charges, and when moved, can create magnetic fields
4. The magnetic field which is created by moving charges (electric fields)
And truth be told, the electric and magnetic forces are really flip sides of the same thing, which was realized long ago, and the two were brought together into one under electromagnetism. But the magnetism part isn't what's important. What's important are the electric fields, and whether they at rest with respect to one another, or whether they're moving.
Back to gravitons for a moment...
As it turns out, gravity isn't actually a force at all. Rather, it's a phenomenon due to the interaction between all the other forces and gravitons.
The gravitons do not actually exert any force at all. Rather, because they're the fabric of space-time itself, and because of an action similar to the
Pauli exclusion principle, but instead of just fermions, it acts on quarks, guons, neutrinos, and photons. For lack of a better term, I'll call it the Gravitometric exclusion principle, or GEP.
At this point, it sounds to the experienced reader that gravitons sound very much like
spin foam, but it's not. It's similar in concept, but there's a key difference which I'll get into in a minute. Nor is it a
Feynman diagram, although Feynman diagrams are very good at calculating scattering cross sections in particle physics.
Rather, gravitons exist in the most dense structure (currently theorized as stacked tetrahedrons). However, there may be structures which are either equally dense, or which exist to allow for the various states of quarks and gluons.
The primary key to this structure is that it's being entirely recreated throughout the entire universe every unit of Plank time. If there's a fundamental frequency of the universe, this is it.
The secondary key is that gravitons are averse to all other forms of matter and energy. Due to GEP, as gravitons wink in and out... and back in to existance, if anything else happens to be in the way, either that position will remain unoccupied, or the graviton that would have occupied that position will shift enough to allow both the other particle and the graviton to occupy adjacent spaces.
This causes slight gaps to open up in this framework, gaps which become very important as as it relates to general relativity.
The key issue here is that while this framework is somewhat flexible, it's not as flexible as one might think, and it takes an infinately long distance (number of gravitons) for the framework to return to normal.
This is why gravity acts at infinately long distances.
Yet another key issue is that the adjustment of one particle does not immediately proceed to the other particles. It takes the next cycle of Plank time to affect the adjacent particles, the next cycle to affect the next set, and so on. This is why gravity propogates at the speed of light.
Since the affect of a larger amount of matter has a greater affect on the gravton matrix, it introduces more "holes" within the matrix, thereby increasing the distance between the gravitons more in the vicinity of a planet than distant from that planet.
The final key issue is that the average density of the gravitons affect the local Plank length.
With that, we'll move on to the next entry.