Why does Space-Time curve and more importantly, why and how does Space and Time come together to form a “fabric”?
In: Physics
The Space-Time Fabric is a **metaphor** used to explain to the space-time curvature and why things get funky around around super-massive objects like black holes.
Imagine space as a 2d plane, in this case a well made checker quilt. You and your friends each grab a corner and stretch it taut. Another friend rolls some marbles across the quilt’s surface. The marble are fairly small and don’t distort the surface as they move across in a straight lines. Now, the friend drops a bowling ball onto the quilt. It’s big and heavy enough that it does distort the surface of the fabric, causing it to bend and curve under the weight of the bowling ball. Some more marbles are rolled across and instead of moving in straight lines, they curve following the shape of the fabric underneath them. You can physically see the distortions in the surface as the straight lines of the checker’s grid are pulled down and twisted.
At this point, things still make sense, as the gravity of super-massive objects like black holes as the same effect on space-time as the bowling ball has on the fabric of the quilt. Where the metaphor sheers is that since space is 3d, the curvature doesn’t appear in a spatial dimension, it appears it time. What that physically means, I am not entirely sure, but it makes the math work out and what little observations we have match the math. I’m not a physicist, so I am out of depth, but hopeful this answers your question.
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