Relativity

Apologies all around for stealing this from my own defunct blog.

“The theory of general relativity conceived of empty space as actually being a fabric of space and time, with gravity caused by the imprints objects make in it. Imagine the depression a basketball would make if placed in the center of a taut sheet; when a less massive object, like a marble, travels close to the ball, it will be derailed off its course and begin circling in the curved depression made by the ball. In this way, the earth orbits the sun, and we are forever floundering in the deep space-time trench around the earth. Einstein’s gravity is not so much a force as a circumstance: the very material of the cosmos has crumpled steeply around you until, almost conspiratorially, all of your possible paths have been narrowed to one.”

- Jon Mooallem, “A Curious Attraction: On the quest for antigravity”

Harpers Magazine, October 2007