>I love that there are people far more educated than me who are also paid to explore these topics.

Sadly, there's some of us who would explore these topics, yet the pay and some of the conditions surrounding this profession are less than ideal, so to speak.

Also, you might want to study the math around the strong interaction and gravity before making any speculation like that. What is explained to you in words might not be accurate.

That's interesting. I've had the opposite thought: that spacetime is created by particle interactions, and so mass is essentially "shedding" spacetime. You'd think this would push other particles away, but the process of spacetime being shed away from a mass would be slow, but the increased density caused by spacetime creation would cause particles to be attracted in the direction of higher density.

In black holes, this process would break down in a particular way such that it's not possible to create more spacetime. That's why the amount of information a black hole can store grows with the area of the black hole, not the volume. There is no spacetime inside it for information to enter.

I feel like this could explain "dark energy".. spacetime piles up in the empty regions between galaxies, and the curvature isn't strong enough to create significant attraction, so at that scale, things end up moving away from each other. So basically the same idea you had I think, but opposite.

I believe in a stochastic process for wavefunction collapse, and I think entanglement may be related to the process of spacetime creation. Entangled particles are connected by a single filament of spacetime. This filament can only be used once before being destroyed, so it'd participate in the "resolution" necessary for wavefunction collapse, but then disappear. That is: there is no "spooky action at a distance" because from the entangled particles perspective they're still right next to each other in the graph of spacetime.

It was interesting to see that Stephen Wolfram seems to be suggesting something along those lines, but I'm not smart enough to understand if my ideas are similar to what he's proposing. I'm probably completely wrong anyway.

>"spacetime is created by particle interactions", I wonder if space is particle interactions. In the basic physics classes as part of a biology degree, I've used a lot of formulas where the strength of an interaction between objects increases with proximity. What if its the other way around?, the strength of interactions between particles is proximity and the sum of interactions between all particles we conceptualise as space.

> What causes this 'consumption' of spacetime around objects with mass?

> Gluon color confinement

This seems rather unlikely, given that not all particles interact strongly[0] (i.e. have color charge) but still interact with gravity.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_chromodynamics

Maybe matter is like a balloon and gravity is like air pressure pushing on it.

I like how this is currently the top-voted comment.

It a great example of the fundamental process at the root of all humans progress/knowledge: a creative conjecture/idea which can (hopefully) be tested against reality and rejected or accepted based on how well it solves the problem and explains something about reality.