What do they mean when they say space time is curved? I keep hearing a lot of talk about Space Time being the 4th dimension, and no matter how many trampoline examples I see, I just don’t get it.
In: Physics
Truly empty space-time is flat. A photon traveling through that space-time will travel in a straight line. Anything with mass pulls on space-time so that paths that were once straight now curve toward it. The effect of that curving path on other masses is what we call gravity.
As you add more mass, that curvature increases, further spreading the object’s gravity well. An object enters orbit of a parent body if that thing is falling toward the parent but also has enough angular momentum to “dodge.”
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