4 ms·
Great answer! It’s also why I despise the popular portrayal of space time curvature. It looks at space in isolation rather than space time as a whole, and prov
by ummonk 6y ago
Great answer!
It’s also why I despise the popular portrayal of space time curvature. It looks at space in isolation rather than space time as a whole, and provides no intuition as to why objects traveling at different speeds follow different trajectories.
FWIW I think that in general it is better to just teach people that gravity is an acceleration in classical spacetime (as opposed to a force or curvature). It is simply too hard to create intuition for laymen around minkowskian spacetime, and even harder for curved minkowskian spacetime.
- lopmotr 6y agoI think treating gravity as an acceleration is too abstract for many high-school students. For all the on-the-Earth problems, you'd have to analyze them in an accelerating reference frame. That means Newton's laws and the equations of motion don't apply. You'd have to use special linear acceleration equations. An inertial reference frame is simpler and more general. Gravity fits that OK if you consider it to be a force distributed in proportion to mass.