Rubber Sheet Analogy For Warping Of Spacetime

The most common analogy for understanding gravity goes like this.

Rubber sheet analogy for warping of spacetime.

The similarity is that something is warping which changes the path. Now physicists have tested this idea theoretically and experimentally and say it doesn t hold water. This in fact is an excellent analogy. What is the geometry of that slice.

On a flat rubber sheet a trained ant has no trouble walking in a straight line. When a massive object creates a big depression in the sheet the ant which must walk where the sheet takes it finds its path changed warped dramatically. The system has some qualitative features in common with gravity. When a massive object creates a big depression in the sheet the ant which must walk where the sheet takes it finds its path changed warped dramatically.

With a rubber sheet the reason things roll into the bottom of the dent is well gravity. This state of affairs is almost entirely the result of one the most famous analogies in science. A common analogy is placing a heavy object on a stretched out rubber sheet causing the sheet to bend downward. It s often misused to show that mass warps spacetime 895.

If you put a mass i e the earth on the sheet the sheet will stretch out and create a pit into which other objects moons etc will fall in and orbit around. Spacetime can be thought as a thin rubber sheet. The mechanisms behind rolling down a dent and the geodesics of spacetime are different. That pit is caused by the central mass is gravity.

Since spacetime warping can be a difficult concept to understand and visualise an analogy is often used in physics education. This comic refers to a common analogy used to explain how mass distorts space time a bowling ball resting on a sheet of rubber distorts the sheet due to its weight. In general relativity energy and mass have curvature effects on the four dimensions of the universe spacetime. Figure 24 8 three dimensional analogy for spacetime.

That s interesting and certainly a. It also implies that the warp is into a different dimension which is not necessary. That the warping of spacetime to produce gravity is like the deformation of a rubber sheet by a central mass. This curvature gives rise to the gravitational force.

Figure pageindex 2 three dimensional analogy for spacetime. On a flat rubber sheet a trained ant has no trouble walking in a straight line. A rubber sheet warped by a heavy stone left is an excellent analogy for a black hole s warped space right. So the bottom line is that the rubber sheet analogy with spacetime is fundamentally flawed it simply cannot reproduce the motion that general relativity predicts.