Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You_ A Guide to the Universe - Marcus Chown [57]
It stands to reason that, since the astronaut has fired the beam horizontally, it will hit the wall exactly on the red line. So does it? The answer is no!
While the light is in flight across the cabin, the floor of the spacecraft is all the time being boosted by the rocket motors. Consequently, the floor is moving steadily upward to meet the beam. As the light gets closer and closer to the right-hand wall, the floor gets closer and closer to the light. Or from the point of view of the astronaut, the light gets closer and closer to the floor. Clearly, when the beam hits the right-hand wall, it hits it below the red line. The astronaut sees the light beam curving steadily downward as it crosses the cabin.
Now light, remember, always takes the shortest path between two points. The shortest path on something that is flat is a straight line, whereas the shortest path on something that is curved is a curve. What then are we to make of the fact that the light beam follows a curved trajectory across the spacecraft cabin? There is only one possible inter-pretation: The space inside the cabin is in some sense curved.
Now, you can argue that this is just an illusion caused by the accelerating spacecraft. The crucial point, however, is that the astronaut has no way of knowing that he is in an accelerating spacecraft. He could just as well be experiencing gravity in a room on Earth’s surface. Acceleration and gravity are indistinguishable. This is the principle of equivalence. What the experiment with the laser beam is actually demonstrating—and this shows the tremendous power of the principle of equivalence—is that light in the presence of gravity follows a curved trajectory. Or to put it another way, gravity bends the path of light.
Gravity bends light because space, in the presence of gravity, is somehow curved. In fact, this is all gravity turns out to be—curved space.
What exactly do we mean by curved space? It is easy to visualise a curved surface like the surface of Earth. But that is because it has only two directions, or dimensions—north-south and east-west. Space is a bit more complicated than that. In addition to three space dimensions—north-south, east-west, and up-down—there is one time dimension—past-future. As Einstein showed, however, space and time are really just aspects of the same thing, so it is more accurate to think of there being four “space-time” dimensions.
Four-dimensional space-time is impossible for us to visualise since we live in a world of three-dimensional objects. This means that the curvature, or warpage, of four-dimensional space-time is doubly impossible to visualise. But that’s what gravity is: the warpage of four-dimensional space-time.
Fortunately, we can get some idea of what this means. Imagine a race of ants that spends its entire existence on the two-dimensional surface of a taut trampoline. The ants can only see what happens on the surface and have no concept whatsoever of the space above and below the trampoline—the third dimension. Now imagine that you or I—mischievous beings from the third dimension—put a cannonball on the trampoline. The ants discover that when they wander near the cannonball their paths are mysteriously bent towards it. Quite reasonably, they explain their motion by saying that the cannonball is exerting a force of attraction on them. Perhaps they even call the force gravity.
However, from the God-like vantage point of the third dimension, it is clear the ants are mistaken. There is no force attracting them to the cannonball. Instead, the cannonball has made a valleylike de-pression in the trampoline, and this is the reason the paths of the ants are bent towards it.
Einstein’s genius was to realise that we are in a remarkably similar position to the ants on the trampoline. The path of Earth as it travels through space is constantly bent towards the Sun,