3 ms·
Great questions/ideas! To maybe nit-pick a bit to help out: Space time is not 'consumed', it's just curved in 4-D. The Einstein Field Equations are a very goo
by Balgair 6y ago
Great questions/ideas!
To maybe nit-pick a bit to help out:
Space time is not 'consumed', it's just curved in 4-D. The Einstein Field Equations are a very good model of what we think is occurring.
Photons are massless, hence why they can travel at light-speed. Their energy is the thing to worry about when doing GR.
- TheMightyLlama 6y agoThe crucial question I guess is: Why do objects fall down a gravity well if its just a curvature? The 'consumption' to me is more intuitive, but then again I'm just not a mathematician. Is it the field equations specifically thatI should look at or are there others? And also what type of math structures should I be studying to understand the field equations?
- pa7x1 6y agoThey don't fall a gravity well, they follow straight lines in a curved spacetime. Not subject to the other forces everything follows the straightest line (geodesics) it possibly can in a curved spacetime. The field equations define the spacetime geometry but they are very hard to solve, you will gain little insight from them. Instead you should try to understand the concept of a geodesic, how they are extremes of a variational problem, how they are calculated and the physical/geometrical intuition behind them.
- l33tman 6y agoA standard particle is not a point in 4D, it's a track, if it's locally static (compared to you for example) it's still churning happily along the t-dimension. In GR, the 4D spacetime is curved, so when you burn along the t-dimension locally, you might be seen as moving along one of the spacial dimensions as seen from afar (like, when you observe another guy falling down a building or observing dust getting swooped up by a black hole).