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tmoore82 t1_jebq2hf wrote

Reply to comment by Okonomiyaki_lover in Ask Anything Wednesday - Physics, Astronomy, Earth and Planetary Science by AutoModerator

>If you had an x/y plane and put a point on it. That point is not separate from the grid.

This is part of what I'm struggling with. I'm a mass. If it's just me and spacetime, I'm warping spacetime... around me?

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Okonomiyaki_lover t1_jebszo2 wrote

The usual example is like standing on a trampoline or something. You put a dent right under your feet. The further away from you on the trampoline, the flatter the surface becomes. It's pretty much the same but in 3 dimensions instead of 2. You do warp spacetime but you're _very_ small and not very dense so you don't cause any amount of warping that matters.

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tmoore82 t1_jeby4dz wrote

I think that the translation from 2 to 3 dimensions is what gets me. The trampoline example makes sense. But when I try to go 3D, I can only imagine it like a pool, where I'm displacing something else. But another response said that matter doesn't displace spacetime. And you said that a dot on the grid isn't separate from the grid.

I spacetime more like a magnetic field? Defining contours and routes, as well as permeating things that are in its influence?

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Okonomiyaki_lover t1_jec0bbn wrote

Spacetime is the trampoline. The universe is the trampoline. All you do is move through it like you would move over a trampoline.

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