Week 3 video 1: The rules of spacetime

Hello everyone,

This week we are talking about astrophysics, including spacetime, time travel, and what’s out there in
space.

So I just said the word “spacetime”, and while you’ve probably heard that in some kind of context and
quite likely in a fictional context, it actually is a real concept that is very useful in astrophysics and it
has a very specific meaning. So we think about space and time combined as a four-dimensional
description of how the Universe really is. So you have a location in space and you also have the
location in time. And what's interesting is they behave differently in our experience. So what I mean
is, in space you can travel in any direction you want or you can sit still, but in time, we always move
forward in time. You can't sit still in time and you can't go backwards. We're always moving at
one second per second into the future. You can only be in one place in space at a given time - you
can't be in two places at once, right - but you can stay in the same place for a long period of time.

So how do we use the idea of spacetime in astrophysics? Well, gravity is a great encapsulation of how
we as physical beings in the Universe interact with spacetime. So gravity is a force that pulls objects
together because they have mass. And so our everyday experience with gravity is that we're on the
Earth and we are held to the Earth by the force of gravity. And of course the Earth is attracted to us by
exactly the same amount of force as we are attracted to the Earth

In what's called Newtonian gravity, space and time are separate things. And it's a somewhat simplified
version of the real universe, but it works pretty well as a description, it's accurate enough for most of
our everyday experience. And we can put rules to how gravity works by looking at how it changes as
a function of how massive the objects are that are being attracted to each other and how far away from
each other they are. And the general sense of those rules is that more massive objects have a stronger
force of gravity between them, and closer objects have a stronger force of gravity between them.

So if you want to make a comparison between the forces felt by pairs of objects, we've got our blue
billiard ball on the left, and our purple billiard ball on the right, if we make them more massive, then
the force of gravity they feel toward each other will be stronger. But if you move them farther apart
from each other the force they feel toward each other from gravity will get smaller.

To put some maths to this, you can calculate F, the force of gravity, as Gmm/r 2, where m1 is the mass
of object 1 and m2 is the mass of object 2, and R is the distance between them. G is the gravitational
constant. It is just a constant that you don't have to remember the value of, but if you want to calculate
the force between two objects in physical units, you just need to include your gravitational constant G
in there. And the r with the little triangle-y thing over it at the end of the equation there is a unit
vector. It simply tells us what direction the force is acting in. And so in the direction r means that the
force each object feels is pulling toward the other object, so it's going along the line that separates
them. If you were to move freely in space, they would travel directly toward each other. And you can
see the equation here does the work that we would expect from what we said before, that larger
masses will have a larger force between them, but objects that are further apart, so r gets bigger, the
force between them will be smaller.

And so we can do a couple of specific examples of this. And say if we start with two objects, m 1 and
m2 and a distance r apart, and then we move them to be 2r apart, then the force they feel of gravity
attracting them together will be one fourth as strong. And if they were three times as far apart, then
the force would be one ninth as strong as it was originally, and so on and so forth. If you made one of
the masses twice as large but kept them the same distance, the force between them would get twice as
large. There's a lot of different manipulations you could do with this.
So the gravity we feel on Earth is a gravitational force between our bodies and the Earth and that's a
function of how massive we are, how massive the Earth is, and how big the Earth is. r in our equation
for the force of gravity is the radius of the Earth.

And so you can imagine if you took a person from the Earth and moved them to a different body, two
things would happen to the force that they feel. Number one, if you move them to a planet with a
different mass, that should change the force. If you move them to a planet with a larger mass, the
force of gravity you feel should be larger. But if you move them to a planet that has a larger radius,
then that 1/r2 term means that the force of gravity they feel will be smaller.

And so in figuring out the actual force that a person would feel if you moved them to Venus or Mars,
you need to consider both of those factors: Is the planet more or less massive than the Earth? Is the
planet more or less large than the Earth? To put specific numbers to it, if you take a person who
weighs a hundred pounds, which is like 45 kilos, on the Earth and you put them on the Moon they
would only weigh 17 pounds. And on Venus it would be 91, so the force of gravity you'd feel on
Venus would be almost the same, a little bit lighter than on the Earth.

If you were to put someone on the surface of Jupiter, they would go from the hundred pounds of Earth
to the 253 pounds of Jupiter because it is much more massive than the Earth is. And the numbers here
for the other planets are all given. You have to consider both the change in mass and the change in
radius to work out what the final force that a person would feel as gravity would be.

And one thing that's really useful about being able to calculate the force of gravity is that it is exactly
predictable. So if we have 2 objects in space, and that’s all there is, and we know where they are and
how fast they're moving, and what direction they're moving in, and how massive they are, we can
calculate exactly what all of their future motion will be. We can calculate the force on them from each
other as a result of gravity, and we can predict what their paths through space will be in the future.

And so with two objects, this is nice and clean and perfectly predictable, but as you start to add more
objects, you make your system much more complicated, being able to predict the motions of objects
gets more difficult. Every pair of objects has its own gravitational force between it and that points in
the direction between the objects, and so you've got forces of different magnitudes in different
directions on all of the objects all the time. And so being able to calculate the future motions of all of
your objects becomes a very complicated math problem because you have to keep track of every pair
of objects. In general in physics this is called the three body problem, because even just with three
objects, this becomes complicated. And so two objects is really nice and clean and simple; three or
more can become a significant calculation.

So to have a look at the ways the objects move under gravity, there's a couple of resources I would
recommend. There’s a game called Orbit, in which you have a small moon that’s orbiting a bigger
planet, basically, and you can change its speed and you can see how the orbit changes. There is a
YouTube video on “weird orbits”, where they look at some funny situations you can get into when
you have multiple objects at very particular positions relative to each other. And this idea that it's very
hard to predict where objects are going to be once you have even three of them is very central to the
novel “The Three Body Problem” by Cixin Liu.

Being able to calculate and predict the motions of objects through space is a Nobel Prize winning
concept. So, in 2020 the astronomer Andrea Ghez at UCLA won the Nobel Prize for proving
observationally that there has to be a supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way. So the
picture here is an extreme close up taken directly toward the centre of the Milky Way. And so the
bright parts, the red and the yellow, are stars, and the dots on there are the measured positions of
particular stars over the span of 19 years from 1995 to 2014.

The ovals that go through them are the calculated orbits: based on the previous positions of the dots,
where will they be in the future? And the only way you can do this accurately is if you know where
the stars are in space, how fast they're moving, and what the mass of the thing they're orbiting is.
From the speed of these stars we can infer that there has to be something very massive that's holding
them all in those orbits. But we know that it must be very small because the inner parts of those orbits
are very close together, and we know that it must be not very bright because we can't see it in this
image. And so although the theoretical idea of black holes has been well established for a long time,
it's this kind of observational view that really drives home that there has to be a supermassive black
hole at the centre of our galaxy.

So I said at the beginning that spacetime is the way that we think about the rules of the Universe that
we live in, and it's one of the underlying concepts of general relativity that those four dimensions are
fundamentally connected to each other, that they interact. One of the ways to think about the
connection between space and time is that spacetime has a shape that is affected by mass. When
objects move through spacetime, how they move is controlled by the shape of spacetime where they
are. So what I mean is, in the Newtonian gravity sense, when we see objects moving in space, we see
a force of gravity between them that causes them to move toward each other. The general relativity
equivalent of that is to say that the shape of spacetime is such that they want to roll sort of downhill
toward each other, that objects move through spacetime but spacetime itself is curved and so objects
follow a curved path.

So the illustration here is meant to show that, that if you think of spacetime as this mesh and you put
objects with mass into it, that they stretch the mesh. And so if you were to try to roll a small object
through this space, it could fall into those dips near those objects. And we would see that as “Oh, the
force of gravity is causing those things to move together”. It is equivalent to say “Oh, the shape of
spacetime is causing those objects to move toward each other”. The catchphrase version of this is that
spacetime tells matter how to move, and matter tells spacetime how to curve. So the rules of
Newtonian gravity that we talked about before, that if an object is more massive it will exert more
gravitational force, you could imagine in this mesh sense if you made one of these balls more
massive, it would distort spacetime more, and so it would be more effective at pulling other objects in
with it into its gravity well.

One of the really important outcomes this is that spacetime itself has a shape. That means everything
will follow that curvature. So not just mass, not just objects, but also light. This is something we see
actually happening. So light, when there is enough gravity, when there's enough curvature of
spacetime, light actually follows curved paths, it can be deflected by mass in space. And so this is an
effect that we call gravitational lensing. This is a diagram of how light might travel from a galaxy
that's very far away and if it's coming toward the earth, past a cluster of galaxies which has a lot of
mass in it, the paths that those light beams take will be curved and that will change what we see from
the earth.

This is an image of the field with a lot of strong gravitational lensing going on in it. So all of these
long arcs here, this, and this red one, and this down here, these are all galaxies that are distant sending
light toward us through a foreground cluster of galaxies. So it's a galaxy cluster called Abell 2218, it's
got a lot of mass to it and we can tell that because the light from the objects farther away gets lensed
very strongly as it tries to go through past the cluster. So this is the curvature of spacetime in action as
gravitational lensing.

Now, another observable effect of the curvature of spacetime is a thing called gravitational time
dilation. This is an effect whereby time runs more slowly in places where space time is more curved,
so places where gravity is more extreme experience stronger time dilation due to that gravity. And we
can predict how strong this effect should be as a function of the mass of the object and how far away
from it you are. And we can also measure this effect, and in normal circumstances, it's extremely
small. Newtonian gravity is a perfectly fine description. But as gravity gets really strong, you start to
need the general relativistic corrections in order to really understand what's going on.
So to give you an example, if we have a GPS satellite, orbiting the Earth and it’s 20,000 kilometers
above the surface, its clock on board actually runs a little bit faster than clocks on the Earth do. Now,
the gravity of the Earth isn't that strong, so the difference between the GPS satellite clock and the
satellite on the surface is only 45 microseconds per day. Now that's an incredibly small effect because
the gravity of the Earth isn't that strong, but in order to use GPS satellites correctly, we do need to
take this factor into account.

And in other astrophysical situations where the gravitational force is stronger and more extreme,
where the curvature of space time is more significant, then the effect of gravitational time dilation will
also be more significant. This is an effect that's used in the movie Interstellar, which has a planet that's
orbiting a black hole, and it’s way down deep in gravity well and there's a significant time dilation
that happens between the member of the crew who stays up in the ship and the members who go down
to the surface of the planet. Because they're going into a place for the curvature spacetime is stronger,
their clocks, their perception of time is moving more slowly than it is for the crew member who stays
on the ship. And so they go to the planet for what seems to them to not be a super long amount of
time, and they just barely escape from the giant planet-encompassing wave that’s like my favorite part
of that movie. But when they get back to orbit and to their other crew member, he's experienced years
while they've been gone. And that's a very dramatic example, but that is the way in which
gravitational time dilation actually works.

In addition to general relativity, which is a framework for telling us how gravity in the universe and
spacetime work, there's also a thing called special relativity, which is different. It has to do with what
happens when things are moving extremely fast. And by extremely fast, I mean somewhat comparable
to the speed of light. So the speed of light is a lot, it is 300 million meters per second, almost. And it
is kind of like the speed limit of the Universe. There is nothing else in the Universe that can go as fast
as light.

And weird things start to happen when objects that are not light start moving very very fast. And so
we use a quantity called the Lorentz factor, gamma, which is calculated from this equation, one
divided by the square root of 1 - v2/c2, where v is how fast you're moving and c is the speed of light.
And that is a way of qualifying how strong the effects of special relativity are going to be on your
experience.

So when v is very small then the quantity, the square root of 1 - v2/c2 is basically the square root of
one, which is one, and so the Lorentz factor is one and so everything is normal. But as v gets bigger
and say it gets to like a half the speed of light or 90% the speed of light, then that number, the square
root of 1 - v2/c2 starts to get really small. And one over small number is a big number, so your Lorentz
factor gets big, so you start to experience the effects of special relativity.

There are three particular things that are important to know about special relativity. The first is time
dilation, which works in the same sense as gravitational time dilation in general relativity, your
personal clock runs more slowly by a factor of gamma relative to a clock that is not traveling fast. So
your experience of time if you're moving very fast is different to the experience that people who are
not moving will have.

The second one is called length contraction, where when you're moving, your clock looks normal to
you, but when you look at where you're going, it looks like the distance you're going is shorter by a
factor of gamma. And so people who are not moving who are watching you would look at you and
say, wow, you travelled X distance, but you only experienced X divided by gamma amount of time.
And you would say, no, no, I experienced the right amount of time, but I only travelled X divided by
gamma distance. You would both be right from your perspective, which is what makes special
relativity hard to get your head around.

There's a third effect, called relativistic mass. So if you want to travel faster, you need to put in extra
energy, right? But as you travel, your mass increases by a factor of gamma, so the amount of energy
you need to add in order to speed up gets larger. And so eventually it becomes impossible to get as
fast as the speed of light or faster because your relativistic mass is increasing by a factor of gamma.

So special relativity and the weird things that happen when you travel very fast are used in a lot of
science fiction settings. They are a way to do time travel in the forward direction that is actually a
physically sound thing you can do. You send people out in very fast travelling spaceships, their clocks
run more slowly, they experience less time. And so you can pick up your protagonist and you can put
them in a very fast travelling ship, and then you could have them reappear hundreds of years later,
thousands of years later, and they haven't experienced that much time because they've been traveling
really fast but the world has changed while they've been gone. And this is the central conceit in “The
Forever War”, is that our main character is sent out in these very fast travelling spaceships so every
time he gets back to the earth a lot of things have changed.

So to recap, we live in spacetime. Space and time are intricately connected to each other. But they're
different from each other, the way we experience time is different to the way we experience space.

Usually Newtonian gravity, which doesn't consider the link between space and time, is good enough
to describe our normal experience of the Universe. But in extreme circumstances, we need to consider
general relativity or special relativity. If you're in a very strong gravitational field, you need to
consider general relativity, which can cause gravitational lensing or even time dilation. And if you're
moving very fast you need to consider special relativity, which can also cause time dilation but also
length contraction and relativistic mass increases.

So there are circumstances in which Universe acts weird compared to our normal everyday experience
of it. There are also a couple of absolutes. You absolutely cannot get an object with mass to move as
fast as the speed of light.

And these two things are both really commonly used in science fiction as a way to play with timing or
move a story along or a plot device that will allow you to pluck a person out of one timeline and drop
them in later to show them a contrast. But they're real things and we can really calculate how strong
those effects will be and what we would actually see in that kind of extreme situation.

Summaries :
This week's discussion delves into astrophysics, particularly focusing on spacetime, time travel, and
the dynamics of celestial bodies.

**Spacetime Concept**:
- Spacetime is a four-dimensional description of the Universe, combining space and time.
- While in space, movement is multidirectional, time always moves forward.
- Gravity, a fundamental force, affects spacetime, pulling objects together due to mass.

**Newtonian Gravity**:
- Describes gravity as a force acting between objects, with rules based on mass and distance.
- Force of gravity between two objects is proportional to their masses and inversely proportional to
the square of the distance between them.

**Force of Gravity Calculations**:

- The force of gravity (F) between two objects is given by the equation F = G * (m1 * m2) / r^2.
- G is the gravitational constant, m1 and m2 are the masses of the objects, and r is the distance
between them.

**Effects of Gravity on Objects**:

- Gravity's strength varies based on mass and distance.
- Changing the mass or distance between objects alters the force of gravity.
- Gravity affects not only objects but also light, causing phenomena like gravitational lensing.

**Gravitational Time Dilation**:

- Time runs slower in regions with stronger gravitational fields.
- This effect is observable in extreme gravitational conditions and is crucial for accurate GPS
operation.

**Special Relativity**:
- Deals with the effects of extreme speeds, approaching the speed of light.
- Time dilation, length contraction, and relativistic mass are key concepts.
- Traveling close to the speed of light can cause time dilation and mass increase.

**Applications in Science Fiction**:

- Concepts like time dilation and relativistic effects are often used in science fiction for storytelling.
- They provide a basis for plausible time-travel scenarios and narrative devices.

In summary, astrophysics explores the complex interactions between mass, gravity, and spacetime,
revealing both the extraordinary and predictable aspects of our Universe.