The Great Integrity

Buckminster Fuller on tension.

So remember my "imagine mass as a volume suspended within a three-dimensional wire mesh" idea, RE: relativistic gravity? Yeah, so it occurred to me, that's why it's a "stress-energy tensor metric".

Imagine the fabric of space-time as a tarp, stretched taut across a surface. And then imagine that a massive object is a volume slipped between the tarp and the surface. If you slip a second object in between the tarp and the first object, the tension in the tarp will push the second into the first.

Basically, gravity is almost like the "force-normal"—it's born of the tension, the "elasticity", of space-time itself resisting deformation.

I really doubt this is actually a revelation—given the scientists themselves basically named it after that "tension"—but I hadn't really thought of it this way before.

PS. So I decided, speaking of tension, that my aliens' words for projectile weapons actually mean "thrower", "snapper", and "spitter". That is, projectiles propelled by leverage (like spears), by elasticity (like arrows), and by pressure (like bullets). It doesn't make itself felt in the English, since the word just translates as "guns", but since they use stress-energy tensor metrics to propel their bullets, I guess they're actually calling them slingshots.