The Emperor Has No Physics
Sometimes I get a Wizard of Oz feeling when I think about how some physical realities are explained. In the model you always see, the curvature of space time depicted as a graphed sheet:
Of course this is just a model to give people the basic idea of how gravity works, but I think it's more interesting to imagine how it really works. Because the idea of a black hole or wormhole evokes this 2D conception of a flat thing with a hole sunk in it when in the actual universe there isn't any 'place' for space or time to stretch down into. You can't just say that 3D space is curved in any meaningful way without collapsing the scope of the weirdness of what it really means for mass to distort the three dimensional space it occupies.
What I've been playing with is the idea that Matter<>Energy is the same thing as Time<>Space except with most of the time and space squeezed out of it. A planet is sort of a spherical drain with timespace-deficient processes trapped in a big spinning pile, with nowhere to go except into itself and around in circles. Every particle is sort of a tangle of conflicted entropies unwinding - that is dis-integrating over time to restore the timespace<>mass-energy equilibrium. If you pinch timespace you get matter. And in fact, that's what our understanding of gravity tells us:
Physical phenomena of all sorts are misleading when expressed as 2D waves. Even ripples on the surface of water are a cross section of a vibration expressing itself through a medium of two different densities. We see the ripple and we hear the sound but they are the same compression wave disturbing the continuum of mass-energy we share. It's only the limitations of our senses that keep us from hearing and seeing everything, all of the time.
Just as a pebble ripple makes the phenomena of reverberation visible, slows it down and illustrates how memory can work in the cosmos, the sound of the splash emphasizes the pinch. Get it? Shorter time = more energy (noise) and matter (mass of the pebble is communicated acoustically) while slower, quieter waves spreading out in space and both reoccurring and attenuating over time. Does that make sense to anyone?
Of course this is just a model to give people the basic idea of how gravity works, but I think it's more interesting to imagine how it really works. Because the idea of a black hole or wormhole evokes this 2D conception of a flat thing with a hole sunk in it when in the actual universe there isn't any 'place' for space or time to stretch down into. You can't just say that 3D space is curved in any meaningful way without collapsing the scope of the weirdness of what it really means for mass to distort the three dimensional space it occupies.
What I've been playing with is the idea that Matter<>Energy is the same thing as Time<>Space except with most of the time and space squeezed out of it. A planet is sort of a spherical drain with timespace-deficient processes trapped in a big spinning pile, with nowhere to go except into itself and around in circles. Every particle is sort of a tangle of conflicted entropies unwinding - that is dis-integrating over time to restore the timespace<>mass-energy equilibrium. If you pinch timespace you get matter. And in fact, that's what our understanding of gravity tells us:
Physical phenomena of all sorts are misleading when expressed as 2D waves. Even ripples on the surface of water are a cross section of a vibration expressing itself through a medium of two different densities. We see the ripple and we hear the sound but they are the same compression wave disturbing the continuum of mass-energy we share. It's only the limitations of our senses that keep us from hearing and seeing everything, all of the time.
Just as a pebble ripple makes the phenomena of reverberation visible, slows it down and illustrates how memory can work in the cosmos, the sound of the splash emphasizes the pinch. Get it? Shorter time = more energy (noise) and matter (mass of the pebble is communicated acoustically) while slower, quieter waves spreading out in space and both reoccurring and attenuating over time. Does that make sense to anyone?