Can gravity be thought of as a pushing force like the Casimir Effect?
No because it is strictly attractive by experimental verification over hundreds of years of observation. At scales from meters to billions of light years, there is no evidence whatever that gravity has any ‘pushing’ or repulsive characteristics. In the Casimir Effect, the virtual electron-positron pairs in the physical vacuum can produce a repulsive force between two conducting plates. This effect can be measured and proves that the physical vacuum is not electrodynamically empty. There is, however, no gravitational analog to this phenomenon except in the special case of the false vacuum ‘anti-gravity’ effect which is caused by a proposed scalar field component to the physical vacuum. If it turned out that there did exist such a field in nature, it would act like a non-zero cosmological constant and partially cancel the attractiveness of gravity at the cosmological scale. The EFFECTIVE force of gravity would be slightly reduced, but would not be made into a fully repulsive force. A rel
