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Comment by baghira | Hacker News Reader

I strongly disagree. There's a regime in which Newtonian gravity describes the world. There is no such regime for the rubbersheet model of GR, since the Earth's gravity is responsible, not the sheet's curvature. It's the illusion of explanation.

EDIT: I'd also remark that collapsing centuries of debate on what's a scientific theory into "everything is an analogy" is a disservice to the public: good luck distinguishing realism, structural realism, positivism, etc., if you put on the same level science popularizations and proper (albeit imperfect and incomplete) scientific theories.

Also, the science communication bit is a red herring. There are plenty of concepts that cannot be explained easily to the public. One might justify just as well going around popularizing Laffer's curve, since actual macroeconomics is impossible to explain on a napkin.

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I think it's a fine way to introduce the notion that mass bends spacetime, and "gravity" is the phenomenon of traveling that curved spacetime. We can show the warping of a two-dimensional plan by projecting it into the third-dimension, giving an intuition by analogy. I don't know how to actually show warped three-dimensional space, since we can't project into into a fourth-dimension.

I still disagree: the problem is not the number of dimensions, the problem is that the physics is wrong.

If one flips the rubbersheet, the geodesics are the same, but clearly now the model doesn't match our intuition. Indeed the objects are attracted by the mass because of the Earth's gravitational potential, not because of the rubbersheet curvature. The balls are following the variation in height of the sheet (in a sense a first order variation) not the curvature of it (the second order variation). The model is bending the wrong component (space, instead of time), and with the wrong sign (the geodesics are repelled by the mass).

As pointed out by Ron Maimon in this answer: http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/1019/common-false...

a much better explanation can be offered introducing proper time and the effect of gravity on it.

"It is just as easy to explain things correctly, in terms of time slowing down near a massive object, and world-lines trying to maximize their proper time with given fixed endpoints"

Could you explain it to me this way?

A decent explanation is here: http://www.physicspages.com/2013/03/30/geodesics-paths-of-lo... (I haven't checked all the calculations though). A similar explanation is shown in Feynman's lectures:http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/II_42.html

...We can now write out the Lagrangian differential equations...

Finally, an explanation of gravity in layman's terms.

You are right, of course (although I'd argue that the term layman is poorly defined, on HN I'd expect a significant fraction of readers to know what a differential equation is).

Still, there is the kernel of the correct explanation which could probably be presented to the larger public, starting with the well known explanation for refraction in terms of minimal paths (the lifeguard trying to save a drowning man), passing to the fact that in special relativity the trajectory of the free particle maximizes the proper time, and ending up with the gravitational case.

The main problem with this analogy is that the thing it's trying to explain (gravity) is tangled into the analogy (balls bend the sheet because of gravity) so it doesn't provide an independent viewpoint. On first encounter this analogy seems to lead to great enlightenment but a bit of thought reveals that it doesn't really explain anything, even in simplified terms.

It's not hard to summarize the basic tenants of GR, here is a very good attempt: http://physics.stackexchange.com/a/3018/852. For a layperson I would focus on (1), what a geodesic means (what's the shortest way to travel from NYC to London, etc.). Then I would move to (2) and say that we don't know why that is the case. This would be a nice segue into a discussion about how Physics just describes observed phenomena with equations and the explanations are iterative.

Also, the science communication bit is a red herring

What? It's literally the core of the conversation.

Your argument seems to be "it's impossible to accurately explain GR to people in a way they'll understand, so we shouldn't even try, and any attempt to use analogies that may lead to incorrect intuition should be abandoned".

I fundamentally disagree with that premise. It's the height of academic elitism, and presumes that perfect fidelity that few understand is more important than imperfect analogy that might allow laymen to gain some minimal insight.

The economics version of the rubber sheet is the "law of supply and demand," which economists know is simplistic and incomplete, but still useful for giving a regular Joe the basic idea of what economics does.

The Laffer curve is just wrong on its face.

The rubbersheet economy (as a dialogue):

1. Prices move according to the law of supply and demand.

2. Right: why do they move though?

1. Simple: every hour the central government determines the current supply and demand for all goods, and computes the right price.

It looks like a market economy, the prices move in the right direction (the balls are "attracted" to each other), but the explanation is a planned economy (the effect of Earth gravity).

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