general relativity - Does mass create space?

This is a tough question to answer because the dimensions of your proverbial cube would be affected by the mass inside (as dimensions can only exist in space, so anything that affects space will also bend your cube), and mass does not bend space, it bends spacetime. You have to keep in mind that when talking about special and general relativity, you are talking about four-dimensional spacetime. This is what is curved by mass. For example, due to the curvature of spacetime due to Earth's gravity, you feel the same effects on its surface that you would if you were accelerating upwards at 9.8 m/s^2 through deep space (where we assume there is no gravity). This doesn't mean the physical space is curved - if you draw a straight line on a piece of paper in space and then travel down to Earth's surface, it will remain straight. Instead, spacetime is curved, which can affect objects' paths of motion, but not the objects themselves. Now to your questions:

• The volume inside of the cubes would be exactly the same, but two identical objects flying through each cube would follow two different paths, and if either looked at the other, it would see that the other's clock is moving at a different speed than its own due to time dilation (due to the curvature of spacetime towards mass, time moves more slowly closer to massive objects). We can see evidence of the effect of gravity on paths with gravitational lensing. Light travels in a straight line through spacetime, but when looking at the space around a star, you will actually see objects that should be directly behind the star and blocked from sight. This is because light rays that, in the absence of gravity, would pass next to the star and continue off at an angle are pulled towards the star by it's gravitational field (in reality they're just following the curvature of spacetime around the massive star), so they curve around the star, becoming visible to us, even though, in space alone, they should be blocked by the star.


• The distribution of the mass has no effect on the gravitational field around it (same with electromagnetic fields). If you look at any equation that has to do with gravity (gravitational potential energy, gravitational force, etc.), you will find a term for the total mass of the object, but unless you are within the bounds of the control volume containing the mass, the distribution does not matter. This is one of the reasons why black holes are so hard to study - we can tell how much mass is inside of them, but without the ability to see inside, we have no other way of detecting their properties.


• Like I said above, the volume is not affected because space is not warped by gravity, only spacetime. If you made a physical box (or we'll say a cube frame) around empty space and then moved it to a space that contained a star, it would remain the same size and shape (assuming that it was strong enough to withstand the force of gravity pulling it towards the massive star).


• Neither, it simply curves spacetime.