B Does Space Recover or Oscillate After Being Distorted by Massive Objects?

  • B
  • Thread starter Thread starter pforeman
  • Start date Start date
  • Tags Tags
    Fabric of space
pforeman
Messages
21
Reaction score
0
When a massive object travels through space distorting its geometry, does the space gradually revert to its previous state, or does it oscillate back and forth eventually settling into its state as it was before it was distorted by the massive object ?
If the fabric of of space has a high tension value, then this would be a lot of energy added to space and might affect Hubbles constant ?
When watching the LIGO recording of two black holes merging, could the end of the gravitational wave recorded be from the fabric of space reverberating.
 
Physics news on Phys.org
There is no "fabric" of spacetime. Spacetime is geometry. It's where things happen, not a thing itself.
 
Last edited:
Neither. It is simply not how things work. Furthermore, gravity is the geometry of spacetime, not space. The time part is extremely important.
 
Unfortunately, "fabric" is a metaphor, and quite a poor one.

Relativity models spacetime, not space. Spacetime is a 4d structure, and to get what we call "space" from it you have to (mathematically) slice it into a stack of 3d sheets, analogous to slicing a block of cheese into a stack of 2d slices. Each slice is "space at one instant", and the notion of the geometry of space changing with time comes from looking at each successive slice, not from any single thing changing. Furthermore, as Orodruin notes, quite a lot of the important curvature lies in planes orthogonal to any such slicing and is lost in this visualisation.

The animations of gravitational waves that I've found on a quick search describe themselves as showing "the strength of curvature", so I doubt they're even direct representations of any choice of space. They're likely plots of some summary parameter like the Kretchmann scalar.
 
Last edited:
In this video I can see a person walking around lines of curvature on a sphere with an arrow strapped to his waist. His task is to keep the arrow pointed in the same direction How does he do this ? Does he use a reference point like the stars? (that only move very slowly) If that is how he keeps the arrow pointing in the same direction, is that equivalent to saying that he orients the arrow wrt the 3d space that the sphere is embedded in? So ,although one refers to intrinsic curvature...
ASSUMPTIONS 1. Two identical clocks A and B in the same inertial frame are stationary relative to each other a fixed distance L apart. Time passes at the same rate for both. 2. Both clocks are able to send/receive light signals and to write/read the send/receive times into signals. 3. The speed of light is anisotropic. METHOD 1. At time t[A1] and time t[B1], clock A sends a light signal to clock B. The clock B time is unknown to A. 2. Clock B receives the signal from A at time t[B2] and...
So, to calculate a proper time of a worldline in SR using an inertial frame is quite easy. But I struggled a bit using a "rotating frame metric" and now I'm not sure whether I'll do it right. Couls someone point me in the right direction? "What have you tried?" Well, trying to help truly absolute layppl with some variation of a "Circular Twin Paradox" not using an inertial frame of reference for whatevere reason. I thought it would be a bit of a challenge so I made a derivation or...
Back
Top