Here's a little pro-tip: don't make stuff up. When you're reading, take what you're reading as how things are - don't mangle them into your own pet idea. Do you think scientists do their sciencing half way, and then give up, saying "Well, we've taken it about as far as we can. We'll just have to wait for some guy who's read a few books to come along and connect all the dots into a proper model of the universe."
Actually, for the first time I find myself a bit more sympathetic towards Willem here. While the notion of "activating spacetime" does not seem to have any meaning, I think it is fair to say the the concept of a field as a physical thing is quite difficult. Anyone taught any physics quickly gets used to the rather artificial concept of the "particle": an idealised object, having properties (e.g. mass, charge, momentum, etc) but no physical extension in space. Why we all buy this rather nonsensical idea is a matter of culture and tradition, I suppose. But we are all comfortable with this. Fields however seem to take on different characters as we learn more. At first, a field is a sort of immaterial representation of an influence, at a distance, of one particle or object with certain properties on another (objects with mass, wires carrying a current, electrostatically charged objects and so forth). These fields seem to radiate outward from the object causing them like light rays, hence their strength falls off inversely with the square of distance, etc. So far so good. But then we learn that EM radiation consists of oscillations of electric and magnetic fields that propagate through space to indefinite distances from the object that gave rise to them. The fields now seem to have an existence throughout space and it is the disturbances in them that give rise to particle-like phenomena (photons). And then finally we (or some of us) get to Quantum Field Theory, which generalises what we have learnt about EM radiation into a model for all particles of matter, too. So at the end of all this, the fields have become more fundamental entities than the "particles" and matter itself is a series of disturbances in fields! At this point it is not unnatural to ask WTF fields "really" are.
I'd say, more generally, that a field is simply a property that has some value at every point in spacetime - continuous and contiguous.
Yes that is of course true, mathematically, but immediately raises the question of how one can have a property at any point in space without that property being a property of something. An easy example is wind strength and direction on a weather map. It is a vector field, but it is a property of air in motion, i.e. of something. What is the something in the case of quantum field? This may be why our friend is grasping at "spacetime".
There is no such word as 'activated' in the description of space time or gravity. You said you studies 1st year physics, right? This is a science forum. If you want to make up words, try a fiction-writing forum.
Perhaps, you're just using the wrong word? Activated would suggest spacetime has an on/off switch. How about the word, "Exert"?
I think wikipedia does electrostatic and magnetic fields here:- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_electrodynamics As to how helpful it is is another matter. Edit - it seems there is more going on in 'empty space' than just empty space.
For Electromagnetic Field set: S_1,2,3 x S_5 = S_e. Electromagnetically exerted S_e that can curve = Electromagnetic Field. Similarly for other fileds: one field per dimension gives (C x C) x C. We need 8 + 3 dimensions for this.
Agree with your last statement. But I'm not sure that Wiki article is terribly helpful about the nature of the fields implicated in the modern physics picture of matter. For instance at a couple of points it refers to "spin 1/2 fields", without explaining what they are. I presume they mean the Dirac field used to model fermions. But what exactly the Dirac field "is" seems to me very unclear. It looks as if, rather like the tensor representation of gravitation in general relativity, the physical picture dissolves into abstract mathematics. It is probably best to just take it as a model, if one cannot master the mathematics, which I can't. A sort of "shut up and calculate approach", in other words. I do recall, from my time on the quantum chemistry course at university, that if one does understand the maths, then one's mental picture of reality becomes a mathematical one rather than one of physical pictures, and that this is equally satisfying, if not more so. So, as an outsider on this subject now, I think one must simply accept that that applies here.
What are the 1,2,3 and 5 subscripts supposed to mean? Please give the (equivalent of) the Einstein field equations that describe this curvature. Are you suggesting time is somehow caused by gravity?
No, see my Constructing Time Post: http://www.sciforums.com/threads/constructing-time-from-an-axiom.161849/.
