Quotes About Curvature

Imagine we're in a spaceship moving steadily through space and we throw a ball across the ship from side to side. It will move in a straight line, because both the ball and the ship are moving forwards at the same speed. But if the ship accelerates, the ball's path will become curved, as the ship moves ahead more quickly. The straight line path has become curved from the viewpoint of the ship. Similarly, Einstein reasoned, a straight line path in space would be curved by gravity.

So, for instance, even though the Earth is travelling in a straight line through space, space itself is curved, so the planet orbits the bowling ball of the Sun. It is a simple, but astonishing observation. Planets move in straight lines. There really is no force pulling them into an orbit. It's just that the space their straight line path runs through gets twisted.

If there is a lot of matter, gravity will cause space to curve back on itself, yielding the spherical shape. If there is little matter, space is free to flare outward in the Pringles shape. And if there is just the right amount of matter, space will have zero curvature.*

Distance in a straight line has no mystery. The mystery is in the sphere.

Nowadays, of course, we are taught that the flat-Earth theory is wrong; that it is all wrong, absolutely. But it isn't. The curvature of the Earth is nearly 0 per mile, so that although the flat-Earth theory is wrong, it happens to be nearly right. That's why the theory lasted so long.

The floor of the Parthenon is curved in reality so we can see it as straight.

Europe has achieved peaceful political union for the first time ever: They're using this unprecedented state of affairs to harmonize the curvature of bananas.

Was that a smile? (Nora) Was what a smile? (Ewan) That strange curvature of your lips. You know, the one where the corners are actually going up instead of down. (Nora)

quantum mechanics cannot deal with the curvature of spacetime, and general relativity cannot account for quanta. This is the problem of quantum gravity.

The sun bends space around itself, and Earth does not turn around it because of a mysterious force but because it is racing directly in a space that inclines, like a marble that rolls in a funnel. There are no mysterious forces generated at the center of the funnel; it is the curved nature of the walls that causes the marble to roll. Planets circle around the sun, and things fall, because space curves.

With a great deal of effort, seeking help from friends better versed in mathematics than himself, Einstein learns Riemann's math—and writes an equation where R is proportional to the energy of matter. In words: spacetime curves more where there is matter. That is it.

But it is not only space that curves: time does too. Einstein predicts that time on Earth passes more quickly at higher altitude, and more slowly at lower altitude.

Uzay maddenin var olduÄŸu yerde eÄŸrilir.

Planets circle around the sun, and things fall, because space around them is curved.

There was no such thing as a straight line until mathematicians invented one.

Matter tells space how to curve; space tells matter how to move.?

where there is mass there is gravity. And where there is gravity there is curved space, according to Einstein's general theory of relativity. And where space is curved it can mimic the curvature of an ordinary glass lens and alter the pathways of light that pass through.

El físico teórico estadounidense del siglo XX John Archibald Wheeler lo expresó de mejor forma, resumiendo el concepto de Einstein como: "La materia le dice al espacio cómo curvarse; el espacio la dice a la materia cómo moverse".4

planetary orbit, for example, is described quite simply as the response of a planet to the curvature of space in the vicinity of the Sun.

la materia le dice al espacio cómo curvarse, y el espacio le dice a la materia cómo moverse.

If time and space are curved, where do all of the straight people come from?

I hold that space cannot be curved, for the simple reason that it can have no properties. It might as well be said that God has properties. He has not, but only attributes and these are of our own making. Of properties we can only speak when dealing with matter filling the space. To say that in the presence of large bodies space becomes curved is equivalent to stating that something can act upon nothing. I, for one, refuse to subscribe to such a view.

When someone like Richard Branson goes up there and starts doing chartered flights... and you can look back on Earth and see the Earth's curvature, I'll believe the Earth is a globe.

But by 1912, Einstein had come to appreciate that math could be a tool for discovering—and not merely describing—nature's laws. Math was nature's playbook. "The central idea of general relativity is that gravity arises from the curvature of spacetime," says physicist James Hartle. "Gravity is geometry.