What is Spacetime

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Description

A reading from Scientific American, Winter 2021, Page 49, What is Spacetime, written by George Musser.

Vocal Characteristics

Language

English

Voice Age

Middle Aged (35-54)

Accents

North American (General)

Transcript

Note: Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and may contain errors.
What is space time businesses believe that at the tiniest scales space emerges from quanta. What might these building blocks look like by George moose, sir? People have always taken space for granted. It is just emptiness, after all, backdrop to everything else. Time. Likewise, simply ticks on incessantly. But if physicists have learned anything from the long slog to unify their theories, it is that space and time former system of such staggering complexity that it may defy our most ardent efforts to understand. Albert Einstein saw what was coming as early as November 1916. A year earlier, he had formulated his general theory of relativity, which postulates that gravity is not a force that propagates through space, but a feature of space time itself. When you throw a ball high into the air, it arcs back to the ground because Earth distorts the space time around it, so that the path of the ball and the ground intersect again. In a letter to a friend, Einstein contemplated the challenge of merging general relativity with his other brainchild and the nascent theory of quantum mechanics that would not merely distort space but dismantle it Mathematically. He hardly knew where to begin. How much have I already plagued myself in this way, he wrote.