Gravity’s numbers don’t agree. MQ predicts a 35-ppm split.
An independent researcher connects a prediction published before NIST’s 2026 result with a review citation and two historical analyses centered within 3.04 ppm of MQ.
· Release prepared
CHICAGO — An independent researcher who had no role in NIST’s decade-long gravity experiment is reporting a connection between its unresolved measurement differences and a numerical prediction from his own work. Jody A. Geiger’s Measurement Quantization (MQ) proposes a 34.93-parts-per-million split between two ways of realizing the gravitational constant, G—the number that sets gravity’s strength.
The NIST-led paper, published April 16, 2026, opens with two possibilities for the persistent disagreement among G measurements: “new physics or unrecognized instrumental effects.” Its authors call new physics remote and instrumental effects more plausible. Their replication of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) torsion balance left a mode difference without a conclusive explanation.
A separate September 2025 review by Zhang and collaborators, from Huazhong University of Science and Technology and Sun Yat-sen University, had already cited Geiger’s 2023 MQ paper as reference 154, describing it as an approach to analyzing discrepancies among G values. The review discusses MQ alongside other explanations; it does not endorse the framework.
For Geiger, the story began before the NIST result. An email dated September 26, 2021 documents his distinction between electromagnetic and macroscopic measurement routes. MQ subsequently appeared in a 2023 journal overview. He neither designed the NIST experiment nor collected its data; applying his earlier distinction to its particular free-deflection and electrostatic-servo modes came after examining the apparatus.
In NIST’s copper configuration, free deflection exceeded electrostatic servo by 56.79 ± 29.43 ppm, placing MQ’s fixed target 0.74 standard uncertainties from the measured difference. Sapphire produced the same ordering. Geiger’s covariance-aware combination of four mature BIPM/NIST comparisons gives 60.99 ± 26.93 ppm, about 2.27 standard uncertainties from zero. Figure 1 places these mode comparisons beside a second numerical result.
Figure 1 · Historical center and measurement-mode separation
A close historical center, an unresolved mode gap
Figure 1. Two questions for the same prediction. Panel A shows historical midpoints relative to the fixed MQ center. Their absolute values are (6.67398168 ± 0.00027223) and (6.67394370 ± 0.00022912) × 10−11 m3 kg−1 s−2; their uncertainties are about 40.79 and 34.33 ppm of the MQ center. Panel B shows Geiger’s derived NIST mode differences and fitted four-pair common gap, with the fixed 34.9284 ppm target. Whiskers are one standard uncertainty. The midpoint treatments overlap, and the common-gap fit reuses the NIST points. Neither panel supplies independent discoveries. Sources: Institute comparison, Tables 1–3; NIST, Tables 16–18.
Geiger also classified historical G determinations by MQ’s electromagnetic and macroscopic realization rule, then calculated the midpoint between the two groups. Two overlapping treatments of the record place that midpoint +3.04 ppm and −2.65 ppm from MQ’s calculated center, 6.6739613895 × 10−11 m3 kg−1 s−2. Each displacement is less than 0.08 of its stated standard uncertainty. This is agreement in the calculated center; it does not establish the predicted separation.
