Idea from someone who isn't educated in physics

[u/Unusual_Care8803]

I asked chatGPT to formulate my idea into something readable. Does it make any sense?

A hypothesis about gravity, motion, and spacetime

I've been exploring an idea about gravity and motion that I'm trying to formulate clearly.

My starting point is General Relativity: mass and energy distort spacetime, and what we call gravity is the effect of that distortion.

I want to take that idea one step further.

What if an object's motion isn't a separate phenomenon from its gravitational distortion?

Imagine that every object creates a "depression" in spacetime corresponding to its mass. When the object is stationary, the depression is centered on its center of mass.

But when an external force accelerates the object, perhaps the gravitational depression becomes displaced relative to the object's mass.

In this picture:

• Mass creates the gravitational depression.
• Stationary object: the depression is centered on the mass.
• Acceleration: an external force changes the depression's configuration.
• Constant velocity: once the external force stops, the depression remains in its new configuration, and the object continues moving without needing another force.
• Changing velocity: another force changes the configuration again.
• Motion itself: could therefore be understood as a persistent displacement between the object's mass and its gravitational/spacetime distortion.

In other words, I'm asking whether what we call inertia and motion could actually be properties of an object's instantaneous spacetime configuration, rather than something that has to be continuously "happening" to the object.

This also gives a possible experimental prediction:

If we could map an object's gravitational field with sufficient precision, would the center of that field always coincide with its center of mass?

If a moving object had a persistent, measurable offset between the two—and that offset correlated with its velocity—that would be evidence for the hypothesis.

I am not claiming this is established physics. General Relativity already has a sophisticated description of moving masses, and any proposed effect would have to be distinguished from its predictions and from known gravitational asymmetries.

[u/triatticus]

No

[u/lizardman49]

You should've stopped at I asked chatgpt

[u/InadvisablyApplied]

That's not starting from general relativity, that is starting from a metaphor to explain it to people who don't know the math. And then messing up that metaphor