CdCase123
New member
I'm currently reading Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything and just had to share this mindblowing piece from it. I have little faith that it will generate enthusiastic response but whatever:
Spacetime is usually explained by asking you to imagine something flat but pliant-a mattress, say, or a sheet of stretched rubber-on which is resting a heavy round object, such as an iron ball. The weight of the iron ball causes the material on which it is sitting to stretch and sag slightly. This is roughly analogous to the effect that a massive object such as the Sun(the iron ball) has on spacetime (the material): it stretches and curves and warps it. Now if you roll a smaller ball across the sheet, it tries to go in a straight line as required by Newton's laws of motion, but as it nears the massive object and the slope of the sagging fabric, it rolls downward, ineluctably drawn to the more massive object. This is gravitiy- a product of the bending of spacetime.
Every object that has a mass creates a little depression in the fabric of the cosmos. Thus the universe, as Dennis Overbye has put it, is "the ultimate saging mattress: Gravity on this view is no longer so much a thing as an outcome-"not a 'force' but a byproduct of the warping of spacetime," in the words of the physicist Michio Kaku, who goes on: "In some sense, gravity does not exist, what moves the planets and stars is the distortion of space and time."
how crazy is that?! i get really excited about shit like this. it makes me tingle in my swimsuit area. there are lots of moments when reading this book, when one cannot help but be struck by reverie. oh by the way. why the hell isnt there a book discussion section on this site?
Spacetime is usually explained by asking you to imagine something flat but pliant-a mattress, say, or a sheet of stretched rubber-on which is resting a heavy round object, such as an iron ball. The weight of the iron ball causes the material on which it is sitting to stretch and sag slightly. This is roughly analogous to the effect that a massive object such as the Sun(the iron ball) has on spacetime (the material): it stretches and curves and warps it. Now if you roll a smaller ball across the sheet, it tries to go in a straight line as required by Newton's laws of motion, but as it nears the massive object and the slope of the sagging fabric, it rolls downward, ineluctably drawn to the more massive object. This is gravitiy- a product of the bending of spacetime.
Every object that has a mass creates a little depression in the fabric of the cosmos. Thus the universe, as Dennis Overbye has put it, is "the ultimate saging mattress: Gravity on this view is no longer so much a thing as an outcome-"not a 'force' but a byproduct of the warping of spacetime," in the words of the physicist Michio Kaku, who goes on: "In some sense, gravity does not exist, what moves the planets and stars is the distortion of space and time."
how crazy is that?! i get really excited about shit like this. it makes me tingle in my swimsuit area. there are lots of moments when reading this book, when one cannot help but be struck by reverie. oh by the way. why the hell isnt there a book discussion section on this site?
