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sophiecentaur said:I am confused. The rubber sheet model is frequently used in conjunction with discussions about GR, in which it's used to show the concept of "space/time" being distorted in the presence of mass. Which bit of the model represents time and how does the model portray anything other than a 'simple', classical 2D potential well? If time is involved then an animation could be misleading (we don't normally animate simple xy graphs). Perhaps I am just having a problem with interpretation.
lundyjb said:I think this is a poor representation.
DaleSpam said:So do most people here.
Add me to the list of people here (many of which are science advisors, and/or PF mentors) who think the diagram is unusually poor.
The reasons for the poorness have mostly been discussed, and a few better alternatives have been mentioned.
So while you may or may not be misinterpreting it, even if you did interpret it correctly, it would, unfortunately, do little to actually aid you in understanding general relativity.
Amongst diagrams I can somewhat recommend are the "parable of the apple", which you can find in http://www.eftaylor.com/pub/chapter2.pdf, which is a publically downloadable chapter from "Exploring Black Holes" by E F Taylor. You can find a similar diagram in Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler's textbook "Gravitation". In fact, you can see it on the front cover :-).
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0716703440/?tag=pfamazon01-20
minus the explanatory text - and unfortunately it doesn't make that much sense without the explanation.
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