Albert Einstein described gravity as a curve in space that wraps around an object—such as a star or a planet.
But what is it, how does it work?
In: 0
Imagine you drew a 2D plot, let’s say it’s the price of a stock over time, or a slope of a roof, or Babe Ruth’s homeruns per year. Now imagine that you could bend the paper that the plot is on, or that you had it in photoshop and used a transform command that warped it so it wasn’t a rectangular plot anymore. The plot looks different even though it’s still showing the same data. The you look up the stock price from January and it’s still the same, Babe Ruth’s runs are still the same, even though the graph looks different.
That’s what’s happening with gravity. Everything in the universe sits in space and time the same way data points do in a plot. When mass is in space, it warps spacetime (space and time are linked together). Mathematically (that is, this may not make intuitive sense right away without actually seeing/understanding the math), everything follows a straight line in spacetime. As far as we know this is a fundamental feature of the universe. We perceive this “movement along a straight line in bent spacetime” as gravity.
Of course, these words almost certainly don’t paint a good picture of what’s happening. It’s much easier to show. [This video demonstrates exactly what I was talking about](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlTVIMOix3I), it’s just in one dimension of space instead of 3.
Latest Answers