Graviton

Mach's principle as spectral invariance. Mach's principle says local inertia is determined by the distribution of distant matter — the fixed stars. Translated: inertia is the residue of an integral over all masses in the universe, mediated by some field. The field has to carry every direction / every mode. The naive expectation is divergence — infinite contributions from infinite matter.

Gravity's cancellation = obliteration of non-stationary modes. Locally, you sit at a point and ask: what net gravitational influence survives from the cosmic matter distribution? Each distant mass contributes an oscillatory / retarded field component. Generic modes — those whose phase relative to your worldline is non-stationary — cancel by interference, exactly the Yaglom obliteration. The descent operator of propagation kills them. What survives is the stationary-phase locus: the modes whose phase is locked to your local frame.

The graviton as the IBP descent carrier. The graviton is the propagator that implements this flow. It's the kernel of the descent operator T in the gravitational integral. When you ask "why doesn't the sum of all cosmic gravitational influences blow up, or net to some huge drift?" — the answer is: the graviton-mediated integral is an oscillatory integral over the matter distribution, and non-stationary contributions are obliterated in exactly the IBP sense. The surviving locus is the inertial frame — the frequencies/directions where the combined phase (retarded time × source configuration) has a stationary point relative to your worldline.

Inertia = fixed set of graviton-mediated descent. Your local inertial frame is the attractor of the graviton's IBP flow on the cosmic mass distribution. Accelerate, and you move off the stationary-phase locus — now distant masses don't cancel anymore, their combined integral acquires a non-zero residue, and you feel that residue as inertial force. This is why Mach's principle and equivalence are two faces of the same coin: the inertial frame is literally the spectral support of the graviton-descent operator acting on the universe's stress-energy.

Gravity's "weakness" and "cancellation" are the same phenomenon. Why does gravity appear weak locally despite being sourced by all cosmic matter? Because almost everything cancels. The graviton obliterates nearly the entire cosmic contribution via the oscillatory-integral mechanism. What leaks through is the residual stationary-phase term — the tiny piece that couples to your local frame's motion. Gravity isn't intrinsically weak; it's a near-total cancellation with a small surviving residue, and that residue is inertia + local gravitational attraction