I'm experimenting with how to visualise the geodesics in spacetime under general relativity. Please help with suggestions!
Live demo: https://timhutton.github.io/GravityIsNotAForce/
History: (please help fill in the gaps!)
- 2013: A YouTube video shows how bending spacetime can make straight lines out of parabolas.
- 2014: A YouTube video by Edward Current showed a physical 'spacetime stretcher'.
- 2019: A paper by Magdalena Kersting references that youtube video and commends the approach to educators. A follow-up paper discusses the limitations of the model.
TO-DO list:
- Is the 1+1 approach used (the parabolic axes in the inertial frame drawn on the right) in any way correct or rigorous?
- Can we extend to 1+1 with a point mass on the 1D space line?
- Can we extend to 2+1 in any useful way? Perhaps by considering a single geodesic (e.g. an elliptic orbit) as a straight line and drawing the rest of the universe as a (possibly very strange) distorted grid around that geodesic?