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How does general relativity describe gravity differently from Newton’s law?

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gravitational lens — gravity A galactic cluster, about five billion light-years away, produces a tremendous gravitational field that “bends” light around it. This lens produces multiple copies of a blue galaxy about twice as distant. Four images are visible in a circle surrounding the lens; a fifth is visible near the center of the picture, which was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.

General relativity and Newton’s law of gravitation differ fundamentally in their conceptualization of gravity. While Isaac Newton described gravity as a universal force of attraction acting between bodies, Albert Einstein’s general relativity defines gravity as a geometric property of space-time.123

Key distinctions include:

Mechanism: Newton’s theory relies on "action at a distance," where objects instantaneously pull on one another. Einstein showed that massive bodies curve space-time, and this curvature dictates how matter moves. As physicist John Wheeler summarized, "matter tells space-time how to curve, and space-time tells matter how to move".43
Compatibility: Newton’s law violates special relativity because it requires gravitational interaction to propagate at infinite speed. General relativity reconciles gravity with the principles of relativity.4
Predictions: While Newton’s law is highly accurate for most solar system applications, general relativity explains phenomena that Newtonian physics cannot, such as the precise orbit of Mercury, the bending of light by massive objects, gravitational time dilation, and the existence of gravitational waves.5