Thanks... excellent answer, and I appreciate your patience with me, but I think my meager understanding is causing me to ask the wrong question.
How about if I address it this way: Does the gravitational force due to mass do anything other than bend space-time? My schoolboy understanding...
But why does the ball "drop"? In the case of a planet orbiting, if I understand it correctly, the planet is moving in a straight line, but the warping of space-time causes it to appear to us in 3D as if it's orbiting. Is the gravitational force on the surface of the Earth so strong that it warps...
So are you saying that Newton's Theory is known to be just an approximation... but close enough for the limited situations you mentioned? In other words, at this point we know he was actually wrong (no space/time consideration), but his numbers are good for reasonable calculations in simple...
I've been re-reading Hawking's Brief book (for the fourth time :-) and trying to understand a bit more.
He discusses how General Relativity tell us that the planets don't orbit due to gravity, but due to the bending of space-time by mass/energy. That in fact, they are actually following a...