Rubber Sheet Model Gravity

This walking is the analogy to moving forward in time.

Rubber sheet model gravity.

The rubber sheet model sometimes also denoted spacetime simulator or pillow model 11 12 offers an intuitive explanation of gravity. The ants walk forward. The heavier the object the deeper the resulting gravitational well. Dropping a ball on a rubber sheet creates a change in the shape of the sheet.

A rubber sheet is spanned like a very soft trampoline and a heavy ball on it creates curvature in the sheet. It is suitable to show orbital motions curved space and photon trajectories. With a rubber sheet the reason things roll into the bottom of the dent is well gravity. Think of space as a stretched rubber sheet.

When something heavy is placed on the sheet it causes it to dip. Yes it has nothing to do with rubber sheets imo. For this reason epdm material is an excellent medium for outdoor uses. In the words of john wheeler matter tells space how to curve.

This change does not affect the whole sheet instantly it propagates from the impact away. Epdm sheet rubber is a versatile blended sheet epdm sheet rubber is a versatile blended sheet composed of ethylene propylene diene monomer and styrene butadiene rubber. The magnitude of the acceleration is a little larger at the poles than at the equator because earth is an oblate spheroid. Yet no instructional model comes without limitations.

In this case particles in curved spacetime follow paths that locally maximise the proper time the particle experiences. The mechanisms behind rolling down a dent and the geodesics of spacetime are different. It achieves an ideal balance to create an all purpose weather resistant rubber. Here we have 1 space like dimension and one time like dimension curved into 3d.

To visualize the space curvature related to gravity there is a model or analogy using an elastic sheet and a weight. The similarity is that something is warping which changes the path. On the surface of the earth the acceleration is given by so called standard gravity g approximately 9 8 m s 2 although this value varies slightly with latitude and altitude. The deformed sheet provides a mechanism of how gravity arises and the model has great explanatory power.

It also implies that the warp is into a different dimension which is not necessary. Let me try the ant analogy in a bit more detail. The dented rubber sheet done in earth s gravity is a not too bad analogy for newtonian gravity. The orange is curved space time.