lukegregor said:
Hi! Isn't gravity just a smaller object moving toward the lower energy state created by a larger object (time slows down the closer you are to a massive object)?
This is a very inaccurate picture of gravity. A simple question: what happens if there are two equal mass objects?
In fact, the "time slows down near a massive object" claim, although often stated, is only true in a very restricted class of spacetimes called "stationary spacetimes". Most spacetimes - including all realistic ones - are not stationary and there isn't even a way to define "time" in the sense it's being used in that phrase. However, in most every day circumstances you can get away with pretending that realistic spacetimes (e.g. the one in the region we inhabit near Earth) are stationary. But it's only an approximation.
(Note that the above is the answer to my first question. A spacetime containing two objects of equal non-negligible masses is not remotely stationary, and trying to define a potential energy and/or a time dilation factor does not work.)
Futhermore, there are serious problems with general relativity. An incredible range of spacetimes can be shown to have singularities, which are regions where the mathematical machinery of general relativity breaks down. Notable singularities are somewhere inside a black hole and about 14 billion years ago in the Big Bang model. So we know we need a better theory, one which would be able to explain what happens in these regions. We expect this better theory to be a quantum theory of gravity (roughly speaking, because everything that
generates gravity can do quantum stuff like exist in superpositions, so we need a way to make their gravitational fields superpose, and you can't do that in GR), which would include some kind of force carrier particle that we've christened the graviton.
lukegregor said:
Isn't the mechanism that any object settles/moves toward the lowest available energy state?
As I said above, that isn't a generally applicable description in GR. Even if it were, it doesn't provide a mechanism to calculate the energy states near singularities our only model of gravity fails.