I was looking at how our solar system works and see that essentially the curvature from space and gravity or, lack of creates the movement of our planetary systems. I couldn’t seem to make sense of the details of how space is similar to a fabric and can be shaped in some way.
The example used was the age old blanket with a bowling ball in the center creating a wide curvature leading to the edges of the blanket.
How is this possible but can’t be seen, nor does it cause friction?
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Imagine you’re an ant and you’re walking around on a globe. You walk long the equator, following the straight line. You’re fairly happy that this is a straight line. You then turn 90 degrees and follow a line of longitude. You’re also fairly happy this is a straight line (other than the bit at the poles where you needed to go round the stick that the globe rotates about, of course).
Your mate is also an ant, and he decides to take a walk on this globe as well. You both agree to start on the equator and walk north but on different lines of longitude. You’re happy that you’re both walking in straight line that are parallel, and therefore you’ll stay exactly the same distance apart forever. This is why you and your mate get *very* confused when you bump into each other at the North Pole. You give it another go. You even swap lines. Both of you are *adamant* that you’re walking in straight lines, and that your lines should be parallel, yet they’re always meeting at the pole.
So this is what *curvature* is. An object moving through a curved space thinks it’s moving in a straight line — and in a way, it really is — but the way in which the space is curved causes it to behave *weirdly* and you get effects that you can’t explain. In the case of our ants, they’re walking in straight parallel lines yet the curvature of the Earth means they meet at the pole. In the case of our universe, light travels in straight lines but the intense gravity of black holes curves space so much that we can actually see stars *behind* them and the light appears to be curved. In both cases, we’re not really observing the curvature itself — that’s like our ant being able to step off the globe and view the entire thing as a whole, which it can’t really do — but we can definitely observe the evidence (the weird things that don’t make sense) that curvature is happening.
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