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this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2023
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.
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If the spacetime is distorted, and the light no longer appears to travel in a straight line, does that not mean that spacetime itself and the light that travels in are no longer straight?
How can a straight thing be distorted but still be straight?
Is this 2D-3D comparison supposed to be like a human-understandable analogy for a 3D-4D relationship?
I saw an explanation once about how time is the 4th dimension. They drew a line on the edge of a book. From the perspective of a single page (2D) it just looks like a dot, but because we can see many instances of that 2D representation it appears to us as a line. An individual page represents how we experience time.
Is your ball example supposed to be kind of like that because I just can't imagine how spacetime could be a 2D thing in a 3D universe.
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I think a better way of explaining it is with the idea of a shortest path, and not nessesarily a straight line. With two points in space the shortest path between them will be a straight line. If there’s a large amount of gravity tugging on space time the shortest path will be curved.
That's called General Relativity and Reference Frames.
Start watching PBS Spacetime if you actually want to get into it.
You're also entirely missing the point of the comment that was a joke entirely re-explaining the "reason" for ghosts ending up at the center of the Earth, which is implied by the original comment.