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u/StructureDue1513

r/vFlower r/BlockEscape r/desmos r/cultofnatsumi r/Physics r/FactOrCap
▲ 0 r/Physics

What can I do to make this easier to understand?

I wrote this, but it got confusing partway through. I don't know if more pictures would help or if making an actual video with two kayaks would make parts of this cleaner. I'm not the first person to come up with this idea. I'm just trying to explain this without tenser calculus.

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Take a pencil and drop it. Flip it over and drop it. Drop it in several different directions.

"How does the pencil know which way is down?"

"The water in the red area is touching the bank. The water tries to make the bank speed up, and the bank tries to slow down the water. Since the bank is much heavier, the bank moves very little, and the water has to slow down a lot."

"The water in the orange area is touching the red area and the yellow area. The water in the yellow area is moving quickly, and the water in the red area is moving slowly. So the water in the orange area is moving faster than the red area and slower than the yellow area."

Show two kayaks in a river. Kayak 1 is in the yellow area. Kayak 2 is in the red area.

"Kayak 1 is moving quickly because the water is moving quickly. Kayak 2 is moving slowly because the water is moving slowly."

"If the people in both kayaks hold onto the same paddle, kayak 1 will try to pull kayak 2 out into the yellow area, and kayak 2 will try to pull kayak 1 into the red area. Because kayak 1 is moving faster than kayak 2, both will turn and get closer to the bank until they run into it."

"If you put a very sensitive clock at the top of a mountain and another at the bottom of a ravine, you would find that the clock in the ravine moves slower."

"Because time flows slower the closer to the center of the earth. Time acts like the river."

"Nothing is pulling the pencil down; the bottom just moves through time SLIGHTLY slower, and so the pencil moves towards the center of the earth in the same way that the kayaks moved towards the bank."

u/StructureDue1513 — 17 days ago