Gravity is space shrinking

[Gomjabbar]

can you think of gravity as space itself shrinking directionally? and the time dilation effect could be due to the velocity of an object on the surface of the Earth through this shrinking space. Also the acceleration of a falling object due to gravity would merely be the object losing its upward momentum from when it was held in place? This would mean gravity(g-force) is merely inertia. The part that doesn't make sense in the this hypothesis is that the shrinking would need to be accelerating as an object that experiences g-force must be resisting acceleration.

 

[PeterDonis]

can you think of gravity as space itself shrinking directionally?

If you mean specifically "gravity around a spherically symmetric massive object", as it seems you do from the rest of your post, then there is a model that works something like this. It's called the "river model" of black holes:

http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0411060

However, this model doesn't quite view space as "shrinking"; instead, it views space as flowing inward towards the massive object. (In the limiting case of a black hole, space flows inward all the way to the center at r = 0; inside the horizon at r = 2M, space is flowing inward faster than light.) You might try re-thinking the questions in the rest of your post in the light of this model.

 

[Gomjabbar]

yeah I read over that and conceptually its the same thing as what I was thinking.