Except, you know, all the elementary particles. I have this intrusive thought those are just bits of non-smoothly kinked/knotted spacetime but have neither the physics background or sense where to even start to look further into that.
Hm, not quite, they'd be held together topologically but the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometrodynamics is interesting.
>Except, you know, all the elementary particles.
except, you know, all the elementary particles don't do a good job of explaining what GR explains
I don't think a smooth anything is physically tractable. You need infinite resolution for perfect smoothness - essentially an infinite amount of information at every point.
Except there are no points. So somehow you have equations that define curvature floating in some kind of metaphysical space which somehow gets mapped to observable phenomena.
And if it's a noisy smoothness - where does the noise come from?