The Best Representation of Space-Time Distortion I’ve Ever Seen
Or How The Theory Of Relativity Explains How Gravity Works
One of the General Theory of Relativity’s outstanding achievements was the combination of space and time concepts, separated until then. Thanks to the calculations of Einstein and other theoretical physicists before him — Einstein managed to see the common points of several disconnected facts already raised at the time and organized them in the correct way — the concept of spacetime arose, being space responsible for three dimensions (height, width and depth) and time one, the “temporal” dimension.
When discovering that time and space are part of the same entity, it was also discovered that spacetime distortions are responsible for what we call gravity. Massive bodies distort the time-space around them, and this distortion is what “captures” other bodies, causing them to enter orbit (or collide, or be attracted and thrown away).
The problem is that it is difficult to see how this distortion works, mainly because the vast majority of representations illustrating it tend to look like this:
There are two problems with this representation: first, the universe has no two dimensions, so it is essentially wrong. Second, the universe does not have three dimensions. There…
