Physics with Björn: Gravity and Space-Time curvature

Hello all, today I wanted you to inspire you again with a bit with Physics.

Or maybe scare you… he he.

For those that remember we did cover the theory of special relativity a while ago, and we had some cool poems on its consequences and the concept of space time. Today I want to mention the general theory of relativity.

From his early successes Einstein continued to develop his theory of general relativity where he tried to add the concept of gravity.

The theory up till this point had been proposed by Newton and could actually explain everything we can observe. It can predict satellites, postulate the presence of undiscovered planets, worked well with missiles and ballistics. So, Einstein’s struggles with the very complicated math involved was to start with more a cool exercise of combining all theories into one. So to start with it was more a set of equations with some pretty cool predictions that wasn’t possible to verify until way later.

One of these predictions was that gravity could be seen as curvature of space-time. If this sounds wacky this what I thought at first too. But effects of this curvature has been seen.

Since light has no mass, normally it would be expected that light would be unaffected by gravity, but if gravity affect space and time itself also light would be affected since the straight path that light would normally take would bend.

This has been seen as an effect when light from a faraway start passes close to a massive object such as black hole (yes that is strange too) it will bend from its straightest path.

So today I would like you to think of things like black holes, space-time curvature and gravity, and come up with a new poem that have at least some connection to the theme.