this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2023
178 points (98.9% liked)
Asklemmy
43950 readers
767 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
There are a lot of analogies but they all fail in some way. I think PBS Spacetime does the best in general, with good graphics to back up the words.
My layman's explanation is probably all stuff you've heard before. Massive objects "warp" spacetime and things that get stuck in those "wells" eventually fall to the bottom due to drag (from a variety of sources).
You've also probably seen the rubber sheet with a bowling ball in the middle used to represent that warping. To visualize that in 3D, I like to imagine a 3D grid of nodes and edges (like a jungle gym of joints and bars) where the whole thing is flexed inward towards a center point. More warped near the center, less warped further out. That kind of conveys the acceleration from gravity felt by things around that center mass.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
PBS Spacetime
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.