Role of the Universe's Background Gravitational Potential in Relativity Concepts

This paper reconciles General Relativity (GR) and Mach's Principle into a consistent, simple and intuitive alternative theory of gravitation. The background gravitational potential from the Universe's matter distribution plays an important role in relativity. This potential far from massive bodies is c2, and determines unit rest mass/energy, which is the essence behind E=mc2. The matter distribution creates a local inertial rest frame at every location, in which the Universe gravitational potential is a minimum. A velocity in this frame increases gravitational potential through net blue shift of Universal gravity, causing velocity time dilation, which is a gravitational effect identical to gravitational time dilation. Time dilation increases with velocity, but does not become boundless in general rectilinear motion. The Lorentz factor is the appropriate metric for time dilation only in certain constrained motions. The low velocity approximation of the Lorentz factor scales for all velocities in general rectilinear motion, and speed of light is not the maximum possible speed in such situations. Gravitational time dilation is derived first, and velocity time dilation is derived from it. The mathematics becomes simpler and more intuitive than GR, while remaining consistent with existing experiments. Some experiments are suggested that will show this theory to be more accurate than GR.