Sudden Insight: Relativity. gravity, and bowling balls...

As a child, I had a strange fascination for relativity theory. I'd pore over encyclopedias for hours reading about gravity equaling curvature, space-time, and squinting at impenetrable equations. Even now, I am prone to protracted discussions about relativity, quantum physics, and the basis of all reality. Last night (this morning) I was engaged in a protracted conversation on the topic of the origin of reality, relativity, etc. when I started talking about gravity being equal to curvature. The metaphor I had eventually settled on in my mind was of a bowling ball sitting on a bed covered in 2 dimensional graph paper bed sheets. The bed sheets would curve underneath the bowling ball and objects on the bed sheet would naturally sink toward the bowling ball. I quickly realized that this metaphor was unsatisfactory. The objects did sink toward the bowling ball but only because of gravity and not any warping of the bed. If this example was held in outer space for instance, it would immediately lose its illustrative qualities.
I was about to go to bed when a better metaphor hit me. What if space-time was an elastic container that warped to restrain massive objects? I envisioned elastic graph paper stretched around large objects embedded in the plane of the paper. Smaller objects moving in the vicinity of the larger object would tend to draw close to the larger object because the larger object had compressed their space in the graph paper. Smaller objects tend to move toward larger objects because they have less room to move! Imagine that objects move only along the lines in graph paper, and that suddenly the graph paper developed a square that was swollen or distended, while the rest of the graph stayed roughly the same size. If you lived in the graph paper and defined your frame of reference from the graph paper you would not see the bending of your space but you would see objects tending closer to the center of the warped area. Looking at gravity this way also explains why gravity is diminished at distance from a mass. The warping is less severe and has less influence on movement. Since there are no visible lines for us to observe or an visible higher frame of reference we cannot percieve the bending and flexing of our space-time.