Rubber Sheet Analogy For Warping Of Spacetime

A rubber sheet warped by a heavy stone left is an excellent analogy for a black hole s warped space right.

Rubber sheet analogy for warping of spacetime.

Since spacetime warping can be a difficult concept to understand and visualise an analogy is often used in physics education. It s often misused to show that mass warps spacetime 895. This state of affairs is almost entirely the result of one the most famous analogies in science. 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.

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. The most common analogy for understanding gravity goes like this. Figure pageindex 2 three dimensional analogy for spacetime.

The way masses warp the rubber sheet and affect other smaller masses can help students develop an intuitive understanding of how gravity works under gr. 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. A common analogy is placing a heavy object on a stretched out rubber sheet causing the sheet to bend downward. 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.

The similarity is that something is warping which changes the path. With a rubber sheet the reason things roll into the bottom of the dent is well gravity. On a flat rubber sheet a trained ant has no trouble walking in a straight line. That pit is caused by the central mass is gravity.

Spacetime is like a rubber sheet that is flexible. Spacetime can be thought as a thin rubber sheet. 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. The mechanisms behind rolling down a dent and the geodesics of spacetime are different.

On a flat rubber sheet a trained ant has no trouble walking in a straight line. 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. What is the geometry of that slice.

Figure 24 8 three dimensional analogy for spacetime. This in fact is an excellent analogy. In general relativity energy and mass have curvature effects on the four dimensions of the universe spacetime. That s interesting and certainly a.