Wait -- I thought it was pretty well established that objects move in straight paths when no forces act on them. Newtonian physics says it's only when a force acts on an object that the object changes direction -- i.e. moves in a curved path.
By "naturally" you must mean "in the presence of the gravitational forces that are naturally present in a universe populated with massy objects" rather than "in the idealized case where there are no gravitational forces present".
No, no. I am saying that Newton is quite wrong, and that there is no such thing as gravity. Nothing moves in a straight line (relative to an observer) unless it has energy constantly applied to it.
Newton, and Einstein, believed that there is a force everywhere that causes things to deflect from natural straight line motion. But I think there is no such force, and that motion is naturally non-linear (because there is no fixed grid for things to reference to). The "attraction" things have for each other is not, I believe, a mysterious force reaching across space like magnetism, nor a warp in the time-space continuum, but merely the observed effect of everything getting a little bit bigger every second. So, when you let go of a rock, it doesn't FALL. Rather, the Earth expands and rises to meet it. Things moving fast enough move past each other naturally form orbits due to geometry, not a force. Orbits are not a rock on a string. Their objects moving and expanding relative to each other in fixed space. Space isn't warped.
Hey, if you're going to go nuts, REALLY go nuts. No half-assed pantywaist errors for me, no indeed, full-blown pointy-Merlin-hat psychoses or bust, baby!