Dear Petkov
Wonderful and well written essay. I enjoyed it a lot and I would not hesitate to put it in the list of the top scores. I agree with your view in the physical foundations of gravity. In this respect, my essay, essentially points out the physical source of the puzzle in contemporary physics.
You said: relativists who are more accustomed to solving technical problems than to examining the physical foundation of general relativity which may involve no calculations.
I sympathize with this view, I hold that philosophical reasoning should not be disregarded in physics as a tool to understand the foundations of physical phenomena.
From your essay I could figure out that you realize that the falling of a body is not caused by a force. Indeed, it is easy to conclude from careful analysis and observation of gravitational phenomena that objects are neither pulled nor pushed towards the source of gravity but they simply follow the law of inertia.
This being said, I would like to quote some of your phrases to base some of my forthcoming comments:
determining the true nature of gravitational phenomena is the experimental fact that particles falling towards the Earth's surface offer no resistance to their fall.
What also warrants such an examination is that an experimental (fact falling bodies do not resist their apparent acceleration) turns out to be crucial for determining the true nature of gravitational phenomena, but has been effectively neglected so far...
That gravity is not really a force has been considered several times during several moments in the history of physics. Descartes was one of the pioneers. In his treatise, the World, he considered that gravity was the result of the dynamics of the aether. He conceived a model in which space was filled with a continuous material medium and the motion of celestial and terrestrial bodies was based on the generation of vortices in the aether. For this reason his theory was known as the vortex theory. Unfortunately, the consummation of a mathematical model for vortices seemed an impossible task that Descartes' view was difficult to handle.
Years later, Newton firmly supported Descartes' view of gravity, in this sense, Newton was more Cartesian than Newtonian. He realized however that the Cartesian dynamics of gravity was impossible to model and decided not to consider it in the famous Principia. In his mathematical formulation he simply assumed that space was "EMPTY" (even though he knew it wasn't and that the aether existed) and apply the four laws along with Euclidean geometry. Due to the omission of the aether as the medium to transmit gravity among material bodies he was severely criticized by his contemporaries. In defense, he simply replied with the famous phrase: I do not feign hypothesis. After Newton's dead, most physicists believed that space was really empty and that gravity was an attractive force acting at a distance. The General Relativity got rid of instantaneous interactions, replaced empty space with space-time and reinterpreted (to a certain degree) the notion of gravity. Nonetheless, the conception of gravity as an attractive force still prevails nowadays.
You conclude:
that there is no gravitational interaction and therefore there is nothing to quantize.
Indeed, as Newton and Descartes held, gravity is not a force and thus there is nothing to quantize. In my essay, I explained the physical gap that the mathematical representation of gravity has overlooked since Newton and Descartes. I think that Descartes ideas should be reconsidered to explain physical phenomena. I would be glad if you take a look at my work and let me know your opinion.
Good luck in the contest
Israel