Thursday 14 November 2013

The Space Time Trampoline

It occurs to me that when people try to explain the concept of Space-Time they always use an analogy of a foam mattress or the surface of a trampoline to illustrate it. Gravity is then shown to be what happens to Space-Time you sit a mass in it - it creates a dip, or hole, in the surface of space, that objects - usually rolling marbles! - fall in towards.

"So, if Space-Time really is like a trampoline" I wondered to myself, "would this form of space travel work?"

What I had in mind was a sort of bounce effect.

If you were to take a large mass, and then thrust it into the surface of Space-Time using some sort of exotic energy or field source, you could drive it into its surface like an acrobat, and then harvest the spring back effect to lift it out of Space-Time.

I would imagine, to observer's in the 4 dimensional universe, you would disappear in a shower of energetic relativistic particles to mark where the object "took off" from.

And then it would travel out of time, either straight up or down, or perhaps in a non-existent curve, and arrive back in our Space-Time in another shower of energy as its energy is absorbed by the 4 dimensinal universe. It may stay in place if enough energy is scrubbed off, or it may "bounce off again" somewhere else.

I wonder what there would be to see outside of Space-Time? Where gravity bleeds into our world, and where light perchance bends back on itself.

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