8 HN users recommended this explainer6 months2020–2026score 7.5
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026
Called the best visualization of general relativity by many commenters, who say it cleared up long-held misunderstandings of gravity.
ScienceClic explains why the rubber sheet analogy for general relativity is misleading and offers a new visualization that includes the curvature of time and shows gravity as motion through curved spacetime.
“hands down the best visualization of general relativity I've seen.” (HN, 2022)
This video really cleared up a lot of misunderstandings for me: [this video] I had never visualized it this way in my head before, and it all makes a lot more sense now. Highly recommend!
Clears up misunderstandings of gravity via spacetime visualization
Science Asylum is great, but I dislike the 90s educational show presentation format. An absolute gem I've stumbled across is ScienceClic: [link] They have amazing presentations on Relativity, my favorite being: "A new way to visualize General Relativity" - [this video] "Hawking Radiation" - [link] Another, while heavier and less accessible channel is Physics Explained: [link] These are closer like lectures, but I enjoy them because they go into the histories of some of these experiments; and what the prevailing wisdom was around the time the experiments were performed: "What is the Ultraviolet Catastrophe?" - [link]
But under this point of view there's no force at all. Gravity doesn't exert a force on you, the movement under gravity is purely inertial. I know this is bonkers. Here's the video that made me finally understand it [this video] ( [link] is another good video from the same author)
Made the commenter finally understand gravity as inertial motion
The rubber sheet analogy is criticised for this exact reason. Here’s a different visualisation that starts with what’s wrong with the rubber sheet: [this video]
Visualization starting from what is wrong with rubber sheet
Sure, no doubt, a video can sometimes make things much clearer. A great example (to me) is this [1] for example. I had understood from the old illustrations that I was supposed to imagine something like that, but video makes it incredibly clear. The actual net impact of screens in classrooms, however, appears to me to be extremely negative, and I think learning outcomes bear that out. [1] [this video]
Very nice, fairly efficient too. I don't like the explicit split of Newtonian and relativistic gravity, this is often how it's presented in educational content, but it creates too much confusion; for instance it gives the illusion that they are somehow separate theories even though Newtonian gravity is a limiting case of Einsteinian gravity when v << c and gravitational fields are weak (see Poissons eq for Newtons gravitational potential. Lastly, you should consider rendering spacetime similar to Alessandro Roussels spacetime visualization [this video] ; probably the best and most innovative one I've seen.
Probably the best and most innovative spacetime visualization
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