Can The Dimple Be Broken?

Albert Einstein said a lot of things.

Most Notably he said E=MC2.

But that turned out to be – unfairly, but due to geopolitical necessity, about two bombs and the huge inventory of their kindred that followed.

But Einstein said some other, for me, much more interesting things.

One of them was that acceleration equals gravity: gravity and a graduated increase in speed (acceleration) are the same thing.

That doesn’t mean a whole hell of a lot on its face; it seems to fall into the category of either nonsense or irrelevance.

So set it aside for a moment with the certainty that Einstein did say it.

But Albert also said some other things: matter tells space how to bend; space tells matter how to move.

This set of assertions trickle down from the Einsteinian axiom that because light’s speed is a constant that can’t be exceeded, something has to give; and what gives is space and time and matter; gravity is just the umpire.

One way of expressing all of this is that any piece of matter makes a “dimple” in the continuum of space, the size of the “dimple” being dictated by the size of the piece of matter, and “gravity” “instructs” space that such a “dimple” will exist and what it looks like.

That is all based on the predication that the speed of light is constant and the other prime “things” have to adjust: space and time; it’s a kind of spreadsheet like relationship: change one factor and the others adjust.

But if “acceleration” = “gravity”  and if ‘”gravity” as umpire tells space what the “dimple” is to look like, and if, as Einstein says, gravity and acceleration are the same thing, what if “acceleration can be brought from zero to the speed of light with no time lapse, does the “dimple burst?

Question: if the “dimple” bursts, what gives, time or space?

I vote for time.

I really wish I had paid more attention to Sister Michaelene in Freshman algebra; maybe I could have found a path in life that would have allowed me to have the skills to lay out formulaically what it is that I am talking about, with the result of having some idea whether such a thing is possible.

Just the idea of the speed of light squared causes me to want to go to sleep in desperation.

The basis for this post is Howard Bloom’s book The God Problem.

I am reading it for the second time.

I recommend it to everybody who is pretty sure the world has been around for longer than Bishop Usher said.

Everything up to my question is just reporting what Howard reported in his brilliant book.

But my question is mine alone, I have never seen it posed elsewhere (although I can’t believe that myriad people who have the math skills to have either proposed or pooh pooed the same idea have preceded me) and it is a part of a personal metaphor – a big picture -that I have personally concocted.

I wish it were mine alone but that seems unbelievable.

I suppose if I understood the math and physics of the warp drive I would be embarrassed at ever having said any of this.