Here's a anology for gravity
1. Imagine a square rubber tile - thats pinned in all four corners. This is Space and Time. Meaning that were you to be driving a little toy car across the rubber tile, it's takes 'Time' to go from one corner to another. By virtue of the joutney, you also move in Space too.Â
2. Without over-complicating it, your position on the tile (in your toy car) is always relative to other positions. Ie your view from your part of the rubber tile is currently different to that of another part of the tile. This is important to remember when the Theory of Relativity is discussed.
3. Now imagine a big iron ball dropped into the middle of the rubber tile. You can imagine the tile bending quite severely can't you? This is gravity. The effect of large mass in the space-time continuum.
4. To test this theory, now imagine driving your toy car past the iron ball. Clearly towards the outside of the rubber tile, the effect of the bend or 'gravity' is quite minimal.Â
5. But the closer you drive toward the iron ball, the greater the distortion of the tile and the 'greater the gravitational pull'
6. Now imagine that we dont have a single tile but we have an infinite amount - making a 3D space and time continuum.
7. The analogy of a large planet in space makes sense - the bigger the mass the bigger the gravitational field
8. Now imagine a super dense star that's collapsed in upon itself. It's so heavy it's become a incredible gravitational pull
9. Now imagine that the super dense star is sooooo heavy that our 'rubber' tile is so distorted that the corners have folded in towards each other - and may even touch!Â
10. Now imagine that our iron ball was soooo heavy that it ripped the rubber tile and fell through? Does this suggest alternative dimensions on the other side of conventional space?
YOU'RE ALL WRONG!
Brian Cox played [i]keyboard [/i]in D:ream.
*Leaves thread, having made a positive contribution*
Now if you could effect our Relativity - by bending space/time with energy (e=mc2) you might be able to not only move huge vast interstellar distances in no time at all, but to perhaps move in Time too
Remember - if every position in the space time continuum is 'relative' in both space and time, it figures that portals or tears might be created by incredible explosions - like the ones being developed in CERN when particles are being driven together at incredible speeds
This is why there were scientists who genuinely felt that a blackhole might have been unleashed under Switzerland last year 😉
Sorry mol. Why isn't really the realm of Physics. The observation that the universe seems to conform to some ordered laws, albeit sometimes hard to understand laws, is really the realm of metaphysics. You might like to look up anthropomorphic principle, an unsatisfying circular argument about the role of the observer (it's that way because we are here to see it that way), or the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which I like, but does assume uniformity of laws across universes.
I know about the anthropic principle, and it is a way of answering some questions like how come our planet is exactly like the right distance from the sun etc. I do however think why is a question for Physics. However when you get very fundamental that is rather hard to think about.
