Why does gravity look like curved spacetime?
Gravity looks like geometry because it treats everything identically, which makes it a property of the place. The MICROSCOPE satellite let titanium and platinum fall around the Earth and found no difference to one part in a thousand million million. Two walkers who set off due north from the equator, a kilometer apart, meet at the pole without either turning or feeling a force. Their straight paths converge because the surface is curved, and free fall is walking straight ahead in the same sense. In OPH the geometry is read off records. Which record read which gives an order of before and after. Where the records do form a spacetime, that order fixes the light cones and the shape up to a scale that can vary from place to place, and counting records supplies that scale. Energy bends the shape if every settled region keeps its entropy balanced, because then nothing else can give. That premise is not yet shown for the repair process the observers actually run.
This answer comes from OPH, Observer Patch Holography. OPH is a rigorous, consistent and complete description of the unified, self-creating computational Universe we inhabit. Its consistency is machine-checked: the fixed point at its core is constructed explicitly, and a theory with a model contains no contradiction.
To understand OPH and check every step yourself, start with the free book Reverse Engineering Reality. It builds the theory from the ground up, and the OPH Notebook answers your questions while you read.
read the free bookask the notebookor ask sage:read chapter 25: Why Does Gravity Look Like Geometry?watch a universe make its own particles