I’m not a physicist. I’m confused by something at the beginning of the article. It says that space and time can bend, causing gravity. I always thought that the bending of space and time, along with light, were indications of the action of gravity, not the cause of gravity. Have I had this backwards?

Oh man now I feel stupid, I thought having enough mass caused gravity?

That was my impression also. Thus, the bending of space and time being an indication of gravity, not the cause of gravity. This article seems to say otherwise. I hope someone can clarify

They're the same thing, really. Gravity is the effect of spacetime curving around a mass.

Also not a physicist, but it seems to me like a lot of the models and terms we use to describe space and gravity assume a two dimensional plane of space for the ease of visualization. I get the impression that this often has the side effect of confusing the relationships between things like light, space, and gravity.

From what I understand as a lay person this is correct. Mass is what causes warping of space time which in Newtonian physics is called gravity and thus the law of gravitational attraction. Gravity is an apparent force. Gravity is acceleration due to mass.

From my understanding you can imagine space and time sort of like a trampoline. You put a bunch of marbles on the trampoline, they aren’t heavy enough to bend it much so they roll around on their own. You put a bowling ball in the middle, and suddenly all the little marbles are pulled to the bowling ball.

We’re marbles, we don’t bend the fabric much, but we live on a bowling ball that does. Mass causes a distortion in spacetime, that distortion causes the effect we know as gravity.

An experimental test was proposed.

Let's see whether the experimental results match the new theory.

Seems like the dataset for the experiment may exist in the cosmic background radiation observations we already have.

Gravity is a result of the bent spacetime…not some thing that forces spacetime to bend. In other words, mass bends spacetime, and the result of that bend is gravity.