So forget about waves for a second. Forget about spacetime. Forget about general relativity. The force of gravity is correlated to the mass of the object divid

So forget about waves for a second. Forget about spacetime. Forget about general relativity. The force of gravity is correlated to the mass of the object divided by the square of the distance to the object. The higher the mass, the lower the curvature. The larger the distance, the lower the curvature. The force of gravity doesn't change instantaneously. The speed is the speed of light. If you move the Sun around using Sufficiently Advanced Technology, (SAT) the orbit of the Earth won't change until 8 minutes later, when the gravity has had time to propagate from the Sun to the Earth. So what does it feel like if you're on the Earth and somebody is using SAT to wiggle the Sun around? The force felt from the Sun will go up and down. The math that you would use to quantify this changing force is the same math you'd use to characterize sound waves, or water waves, or electromagnetic waves. So we call this changing tidal acceleration 'gravitational waves'. That's how gravitational waves were described in the 19th and early 20th century, before general relativity. Not long after Einstein published his paper on General Relativity, he adapted the same process via which gravitational waves propagate in Newtonian F = m1 m2 G / r^2 gravity to General Relativity/curvature of spacetime gravity. The math is nasty, and it wasn't really ironed out until decades later, but the theoretical predictions of what gravitational waves will look like in any given detector was worked out well before we actually went and detected them. > Space is not an elastic fabric It's a 4D/(3,1) Lorentzian manifold. If you want a better analogy than the stretched elastic fabric analogy, unfortunately the next step is to grab a textbook and slog through the math.