The Physical Ontology of Spacetime: An Interpretation of Relativistic Physics

Contemporary physics provides highly successful mathematical descriptions of spacetime, matter and gravitation, yet the ontological relationship between spacetime and its physical contents remains an open foundational question. This paper develops an interpretive framework in which spacetime is regarded as a physically substantive and dynamically responsive continuum, rather than merely as a passive background structure. Within this framework, material entities are understood as localized, persistent excitations of spacetime itself, thereby providing a common conceptual basis for matter, motion, inertia, and gravitation. Inertia is interpreted in terms of the dynamical resistance of localized excitations to changes in their state of propagation, while the invariant speed of light is associated with the fundamental propagation constraints of the continuum. Relativistic effects are correspondingly interpreted in terms of the redistribution and reorganization of the internal dynamics of moving excitations. Gravitation is viewed as the response of spacetime to localized energy configurations: at microscopic scales as local deformation associated with the dynamics of excitations, and at macroscopic scales as the collective curvature of spacetime described by general relativity. The framework thereby provides an ontological interpretation of the connection between energy-momentum and spacetime geometry, while offering a conceptual account of the equivalence between inertial and gravitational effects. It further distinguishes this view from classical ether theories by requiring neither a medium external to matter nor a preferred state of rest. The proposal leaves the established mathematical and empirical structure of special and general relativity unchanged, and is intended as a conceptual framework for interpreting their physical content. In this perspective, matter, motion, inertia, gravitation and spacetime geometry may be understood as different manifestations of a common underlying physical continuum.