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.

It s often misused to show that mass warps spacetime 895. That s interesting and certainly a. 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.

This in fact is an excellent analogy. A common analogy is placing a heavy object on a stretched out rubber sheet causing the sheet to bend downward. It also implies that the warp is into a different dimension which is not necessary. Consider an equatorial slice through the black hole.

On a flat rubber sheet a trained ant has no trouble walking in a straight line. 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. 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. That the warping of spacetime to produce gravity is like the deformation of a rubber sheet by a central mass.

The most common analogy for understanding gravity goes like this. 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. Spacetime can be thought as a thin rubber sheet.

The mechanisms behind rolling down a dent and the geodesics of spacetime are different. The system has some qualitative features in common with gravity. 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.

Now physicists have tested this idea theoretically and experimentally and say it doesn t hold water. This curvature gives rise to the gravitational force. 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.

The similarity is that something is warping which changes the path. Spacetime is like a rubber sheet that is flexible. What is the geometry of that slice. In general relativity energy and mass have curvature effects on the four dimensions of the universe spacetime.