Thank you for your reply my friendly toaster! I’ll go through your points but I appreciate the thoughtful discussion.
My background is in engineering, specifically computational fluid dynamics. I have a hard time understanding how I’m supposed to simulate an infinitesimal yet nearly infinite mass a t=0 with no grid. Doesn’t work, and it’s not that I don’t like the Big Bang theory, it’s clearly on the right track, but as you said it’s clearly incomplete. Same with Einstein, yes he modeled spacetime as a flexible medium, but that’s because he was observing the behavior of particles, he was not directly observing spacetime itself.
I don’t mean that a particle is intelligent like a person, but it seeks to survive like a bacterium, or an insect, or a piece of self replicating code. You’re correct “propagate” wasn’t really the right word, I was thinking more of photons for that. Survive is more like it. They do things that decrease decay like absorbing more gravitons by being near other masses.
When you accelerate a particle, all the parts of the particle have to move along with whatever wave structure is inside of it. So the whole pattern has to move along the grid and as a result the interaction of the particles themselves has to slow down, thus you get time dilation. Basically, the particles are like little computers and if you give them too much to do they run slower.
Anyway I don’t expect people to give these theories a fair shot because the Michaelson Morely experiment still needs to be repeated in hard vacuum before the truth of it dawns on people. And who knows perhaps the grid really isn’t there as you say.
Going back to high school physics, one of the first things you should remember is that everything is only a theory and if you assume something is true, like a curvature of spacetime, you may miss the bigger picture in front of you.
On particle decay, we can only measure decay which is the delta between gravitons emitted vs gravitons absorbed, thus decay would be faster far away from other masses. Decay is also limited by how small a graviton can be. It must be many orders of magnitude smaller than the particle it is emitted from in order for decay to be undetectable by us.