ScienceClic English Presents:

March 10, 2024 10:53 AM

What if we could see Spacetime? An immersive experience (SLYT)
posted by supermedusa (7 comments total)

I didn't realize gravitational waves spread across the universe like that, to the point of jiggling the Earth. Really interesting, thanks!
posted by GoblinHoney at 11:58 AM on March 10

Wait, we can see it...can't we?
posted by tspae at 1:18 PM on March 10 [1 favorite]

Seems committed to space-time substantivalism. Is that now the orthodox view in physics? It also seemed committed to some kind of dynamic view of space-time itself, e.g. in talking about space-time "streaming" toward centers of mass. But that seems even weirder than substantivalism, since there isn't an additional time dimension in which space-time could behave dynamically. Maybe the idea is that (only) space is dynamic? After all, the video only ever shows the spatial dimensions, leaving time represented by itself. Problem: Mass doesn't just warp space. So, how do we really make sense of a dynamic space-time?
posted by Jonathan Livengood at 2:11 PM on March 10 [1 favorite]

Loved the animations. Thanks for posting.
posted by brachiopod at 6:52 PM on March 10

I'm sorry, but this seems like shiny garbage. We didn't discover that the universe was expanding at the beginning of the 21st century, rather nearly a hundred years earlier (Edwin Hubble et al). After that turd I stopped watching.

Something that DID blow my mind recently was some of the stuff in this long interview with Stephen Wolfram on Brian Keating's podcast. He said something like "the universe is approximately three dimensions, maybe 3.01", I was like whaaaaaat .....
posted by intermod at 7:14 PM on March 10 [2 favorites]

@intermod: he said dawn of the 20th century, not 21st.
posted by Cat Pie Hurts at 4:06 AM on March 11

Seems committed to space-time substantivalism

There's a video on PBS Space Time about this. From what I could gather, physicists generally view spacetime as absolute, but some cutting edge theory is becoming more relational. And Einstein himself was more of a relationalist.
posted by zixyer at 2:33 PM on March 12