The evidence is now pretty strong that Gravity is just a symptom of ‘curved’ space time.

While it’s cool to have gravity all figured out, like so many matters in science, the answer raises even more interesting questions.

Like what is the nature of the curvature? Well, people (including me) are still trying to figure this out. In the meantime it is a good pastime to pontificate about the implications of curved space time. Here are two of my most recent theories/perspectives…

Perspective 1: Trees and apples switch places…

Each mass has a ‘destined path’, a path it will follow if left to its own devices. Just as Newton suggested in his First Law of Motion, things only change velocity when experiencing a net force.

However, he thought that gravity was a ‘force’ that made apples drop, however, the new theory of gravity suggests the apple was stationary – it was the tree and the meadow that were accelerating (upwards), a result of being pushed by the ground.

It lets us think of falling objects as ‘free from force’, and obeying Newton’s First Law.

Now, switch gears. Think what would happen if you could walk through solid things like walls. You may think it useful, but it would certainly cause some inconvenience, as you would presumable fall through the floor and plunge into the Earth’s molten core. You would fall past the centre and then start slowing; you would then briefly surface on the other side of the Earth, only to fall again. You would thus oscillate on some sort of sine wave. This is your ‘destined path’, the straight line through space time that your mass and location intend for you, where you to follow Newton #1. It is simply all the floor tiles and rocks preventing you from going straight in space-time. You are thus constantly being pushed, and thus curving off that path, thanks to the force of the floor. Lucky thing really.

Perspective 2: Slow time really is a drag…

A gravitational field can also be thought of as a gradient in the speed of time. It is possible (to me at least) that rather than supposing space-time is curved, it may well be that it simply varies in ‘density’. How? Well if time passes at different speeds in different places, that can be thought of as a density difference.

Now, we know that even when standing still, we are still plunging ahead – through space-time – in the direction of time. However,  thanks to Earth’s gravity, time is going slower down at your feet, they are sluggish, stuck in the mud. Now if you have a pair of wheels on a fixed axle, what happens if your right wheel gets stuck in the mud? It slows and you turn to the right… and in the just the same way, your body is trying to ‘turn’ downwards toward your feet – the gravity you feel!

When I first thought of this model, I was smug and pleased with myself. Until I found someone else[1] had already used it to accurately model planetary orbits. Read about it here – they have shown that waves (and therefore particles) will curve for the above reason combined with Fermat’s Principle. Bastards! 😉

Refs:

[1] Landau, LD; Lifshitz, EM (1975). The Classical Theory of Fields (Course of Theoretical Physics, Vol. 2) (revised 4th English ed.). New York: Pergamon Press. pp. pp. 299–309. ISBN 978-0-08-018176-9