Relativity Lite

Gravity Lite | 47 Figure 3. The mass of the Sun warps spacetime into the time dimension, as does the Earth by a lesser amount due to its lesser mass. Sizes and distances are not to scale. Also shown is a (solid yellow) ray of light from the star at top left skimming the surface of the Sun and necessarily being guided by the bent spacetime into a bent path. The dashed line shows the apparent position of the star as seen from Earth. The 30-degree angle between the true path and the apparent position is (as is all else in this figure) greatly exaggerated compared to the bending that actually occurs with a star of our Sun’s mass, 2/3600ths of a degree. In this method, a three-dimensional scaffolding would be reduced to a two-dimensional grid, a sheet that can then be warped, like the dimple that comes of setting a bowling ball on a bed. Actually, we should reduce the bowling ball to a two-dimensional disk too, as we have done for the illustrations of the Sun and the Earth (which is causing a smaller dimple) in figure 3. Some illustrators take the artistic license of using still-ball-shaped orbs—such as for the Sun, Mercury, and the Earth in figure 5—to cause such dimples in a two-dimensional space. One final bit of license I have taken with figure 3 is that despite declaring time to be the vertical axis in the prior paragraph, this figure appears to be frozen in time. The more complete picture would have Earth and Sun as cylinders with their upper faces moving upward, the top of which would be “now.” The light beam would be an arc upward as well as around the Sun. While this would be more correct, one can better visualize the angle through which the light beam curves by projecting the path of the light beam onto just one