compressed space time (click for larger)

For a while I have had a problem with this image. And as images like this come, this one is pretty good.  It has some description. It even goes into how light travels in the shortest possible path through space.  Which could be better described as the shortest path of least resistance through space.   To those of you that are like me, you might quickly draw a question from this image.  Why is space a flat plane? Is not space composed of three planar dimensions? That is my problem with physics analogies.  Words often fail to compensate for the lack of appropriate human perspective.  The analogy is appropriate if you are informed about a few of its convolutions.

This image is the rubber sheet illustration it goes like this:

If you took a stretchy sheet of rubber and rolled a bowling ball onto it, the sheet would bow and stretch and no longer be flat depending on the location of the bowling ball.  the “Weight” of the bowling ball creates a depression.  If you put any other object onto the sheet it would roll towards the bowling ball as if they were attracted to one another.  In this example the bowling ball and the other object are matter, the rubber sheet is “space-time.”

Notice two things from this description. “Weight” and “space-time.” In reality, the presence of the bowling ball causes space-time to bend.  This whole analogy/illustration performed in a perceptibly weightless environment would fail. The bowling ball would have no effect on the rubber sheet.  The example uses Gravity to describe Gravity.  A glaring flaw.  It is important to think of this weight instead as “acceleration.” Even in a weightless environment, a rubber sheet accelerating for example, at -9.8m/s^2 (the acceleration of gravity on earth) against a bowling ball will appear just as the same example performed on the surface of the earth does.

The next confusing bit is the image of a flat sheet representing space.  It is easy to get caught up on a 2d space.  Our solar system for the most part even appears mostly 2 dimensional.  The planets orbiting around the sun’s equatorial plane.  In a big giant disc.  The orbiting paths of the solar bodies, or even celestial bodies in the galaxy are easily represented on a flat map. We walk around on what appears to be a flat surface to the earth. But the reality is that space extends and curves in all directions proportionally.  The 2d map, and the word “space-time” go hand in hand.  We are used to thinking of things in three dimensions. We even have some pretty good practice at perceiving time as the forth dimension.  But it is a rare person that can properly perceive a sub dimension of time, that is the acceleration of space through time.

To make this easily perceived, we compress a spacial dimension.  Some illustrations of this compress all of space down to a 1 dimensional line.  And the acceleration of space through time is the second dimension. We call this “space-time.” Get it?

Now in this illustration, there is plenty of room in our human perception to imagine space moving with direction. In this case, it moves upwards at the speed of light.  The depressions along the line represents space that has decelerated from the rest of matterless space.

This is where theories start to differ.  One theory that I really like is to imagine all of space time and matter consisting of strings.  Sometimes these strings vibrate, sometimes they do not.  Non-vibrating strings move at the speed of light and exist only as the dimensions of space through time.  It takes energy to move at the speed of light.  But it also takes energy to vibrate.  Vibrating strings in the form, say, form of a proton.  Waste all their energy becoming matter and drop down out of light speed.  In the end of it all, the combination of interacting light-speed strings and sub-light strings bend and distort the fabric of space into what we perceive as a negative acceleration between matter.

I believe this to mean, that the relative motion of the Earth’s matter, and the space around it is a gravitational difference in acceleration of 9.8 meters per second per second.

I particularly am tickled by the reductionism of everything. Energy related to matter, related to light speed. Defining time, space, mass, gravity.  All of which effect each other in such a symbiotic balance that allow me to enjoy it.

–Keegan, 2010