In a work by Visser, Bassett and Liberati (VBL) (Nucl Phys B Proc Suppl 88:267, 2000) a relation was suggested between a null energy condition and the censorship of superluminal behaviour. Their result was soon challenged by Gao and Wald (Class Quantum Grav 17:4999, 2000) who argued that this relation is gauge dependent and therefore not appropriate to find such connections. In this paper, we clear up this controversy by showing that both papers are correct but need to be interpreted in distinct paradigms. In this context, we introduce a new paradigm to interpret gravitational phenomena, which we call the Harmonic Background Paradigm. This harmonic background paradigm starts from the idea that there exists a more fundamental background causality provided by a flat spacetime geometry. One of the consequences of this paradigm is that the VBL relation can provide an explanation of why gravity is attractive in all standard weak-field situations.

在 Visser、Bassett 和 Liberati (VBL) 的著作（Nucl Phys B Proc Suppl 88:267, 2000）中，提出了零能量条件与超光速行为审查之间的关系。他们的结果很快就受到了 Gau 和 Wald (Class Quantum Grav 17:4999, 2000) 的挑战，他们认为这种关系是规范相关的，因此不适合寻找这种联系。在本文中，我们通过证明两篇论文都是正确的但需要以不同的范式进行解释来消除这一争议。在这种背景下，我们引入了一种新的范式来解释引力现象，我们称之为谐波背景范式。这种和谐背景范式始于这样的想法：存在由平坦时空几何提供的更基本的背景因果关系。这一范式的后果之一是，VBL 关系可以解释为什么引力在所有标准弱场情况下都具有吸引力。