Cosmo 101

I may not have a really sound answer to the question of why all this stuff is so strange but I do have a bit of an illustration that might help us think about it. Have you ever heard of the book flatland? Well it’s about this group of shapes that live in a 2D plane. Our protagonist is a fellow by the name of square. These shapes live in a 2D plane and have never experienced 3D. Now if our square were to travel into a vicinity of very high mass, as in the picture, he would dip down in be warped under the strange warped space. Strange things would happen. He would get distorted. Lengths and time would be distorted. And it would freak him out! Just like we do when we encounter strange things like this. He can’t imagine or see his space being twisted, just as we can’t see 4D spacetime being bent and twisted. But it is and that’s why all those strange things happen. It’s very hard to picture but I hope my illustration has given you a little bit of a better understanding of what is going on.