General Relativity On Space-Time — Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

 Hawking (2005: 46, 48):

But on his return to Zurich in 1912 Einstein had the brain wave of realising that the equivalence [of acceleration and gravity] would work if the geometry of space-time was curved and not flat, as had been assumed hitherto. His idea was that mass and energy would warp space-time in some manner yet to be determined. Objects such as apples or planets would try to move in straight lines through space-time, but their paths would appear to be bent by a gravitational field because space-time is curved. …

The new theory of curved space-time was called general relativity to distinguish it from the original theory without gravity, which was now known as special relativity. 

Blogger Comments:

SFL Theory construes space and time in terms of location and extent, the latter including the notion of interval. Physics construes space-time as four dimensions, and General Relativity construes intervals of time as relatively expanded in the direction of the centre of mass — a clock ticks more slowly — and intervals of space as relatively contracted in the direction of the centre of mass.

On this basis, bodies do not move in straight lines through curved space-time. Instead, bodies move in curved trajectories through space that is contracted in the direction of the centre of mass. That is, it is the geodesic — the shortest trajectory between two points in space — that is curved, not space-time.