Davies & Gribbin (1992: 264):
Gravity, remember, not only bends space but also slows time.
Blogger Comments:
To be clear, in the authors' terms, gravity is the bending of space and the slowing of time, not the cause of bending and slowing. The cause of the bending and slowing is the presence of matter.
However, from the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, this is a very succinct statement of the misunderstandings of space and time in the field of physics.
On the one hand, it is not space that bends, but the geodesic through a gravitational field, caused by the contraction of space intervals in the direction of a centre of mass.
And on the other hand, it is not time that slows down, but the unfolding of processes, as measured by the expansion of time intervals, as between ticks of a clock.
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