Spacetime – George Peykanu

Spacetime describes the relativistic understanding of our universe’s three spatial and single temporal dimensions, advocated by Einstein and Minkowski and accepted by physicists as a powerful and empirically-validated view of reality. Beginning with the presupposition that the speed of light (and more importantly, causality) is the same for all observers, special relativity developed an understanding in which the motion of a frame of reference becomes inextricably tied to the duration of time experienced by objects in that frame of reference. Because reference frames themselves are non-objective, meaning that there is no “motionless” frame, or a definitive center/origin, relativity introduces mathematics to transform between any given frame of reference to another, based on relative velocities. These transformations are computed in coordinates (x, y, z, t), and have the effect of slowing experienced time to zero as the speed of light is approached. Yet exchanging frames of reference is not where spacetime derives its most shocking results: by extending his theories into the Theory of General Relativity, Einstein was able to show that high amounts of mass and/or energy actually distort a unified, four-dimensional fabric of space and time, bending temporal paths towards their centers through the effects of gravitation. This notion, that space and time are continuous with one another, and malleable under the influence of large masses, is the mechanism of General Relativity’s Spacetime, which allows for many spectacular results. Some examples of spacetime’s greatest predictions include the validated existence of black holes: objects which bend all spacetime paths towards their center beyond a certain radius, and the speculative notion of wormholes, in which a spacetime manifold becomes topologically distorted to produce an effective “shortcut” across potentially vast regions of space.

References:
Staughton, John “Time Dilation and Special Relativity”, Science ABC, 13 April, 2018,https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=shared&v=yuD34tEpRFw

Einstein A. (1916), Relativity: The Special and General Theory (Translation 1920), New York: H. Holt and Company, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Relativity_(1931)

Caroll, Sean “How to Think About Relativity” Quanta Columns, Quanta Magazine, 14 November 2022, https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-to-think-about-relativitys-concept-of- space-time-20221114/