Livolsi, Edoardo: Why the Apple Does Not Fall

The present work develops a variational account of gravitational phenomena based on a closed quartic functional framework. Starting from a universal functional and its stationary condition, the admissible configuration space is constructed explicitly, together with the associated Hessian operator and its spectral structure. Within this framework, long-range interaction is not introduced as a fundamental force, but emerges from the quartic coupling term as an effective kernel with asymptotic beha