A thought that keeps popping into my head.

[xiphias]

So, gravitation and acceleration have such similar effects that it feels like they ought to be the same thing -- that one of them ought to be a special case of the other. My gut feeling is that acceleration is a more basic sort of thing, so I just keep feeling like gravity ought to be a special case of acceleration. And then I keep thinking of the "rubber sheet" metaphor for gravity wells in space. And I don't want to take that TOO far, because I'm not even sure that the "rubber sheet" thing is even a MODEL, but it does stick in the mind effectively.

(You know, imagining a two-dimensional version of space as a rubber sheet, and then you put objects with weight on them, and it deforms the rubber sheet, and that gives you a way of visualizing what happens as mass in space creates gravitational "fields".)

So I just sort of think of that rubber sheet thing. And you could imagine that rubber sheet floating in space, but accelerating in a direction, and, with constant acceleration, the objects would have the same effect of deforming the rubber sheet.

So, I just have this thought -- what if gravitation happens because our three-dimensional space is accelerating along an axis perpendicular to all of our spacial dimensions?

Now, where my brain starts having trouble is I'm trying to imagine what happens if the dimension it's accelerating along is time. I just can't get the math. I feel like, if I understood the math, the equations on relativistic time dilation would either prove that this is NOT what is happening -- that the universe accelerating along the time axis is not compatible with the way relativity works -- or that it would give a possible way of explaining time dilation. And I don't know which, 'cause I don't have the math.

Ah, well. I thought I'd throw that out there, anyway.

Comments

[felis-sidus.livejournal.com]

Didn't some quantum physicist or other come up with a theory that time doesn't really exist and the calculations to support it? Was that ever accepted or disproven by physicists in general?