This is a quick blog post about gravity and the way in which we visualise it in our educational materials, take a look at this:
This is what I’ve seen a lot of when I was growing up, it’s also what comes to mind when ever I watch TV shows or have ever had the idea of gravity explained to me in layman’s terms.
But while this does show off the very basic ideas of gravity on a 2D space/sheet, it does lead one to conclude that it would be easy enough to pick up the object and move it somewhere else (e.g. time-travel and teleportation). It also makes us think of other forces as magical forces fields around atoms. Weird.
Instead when I think of things in space I think of them as a part of space:
You’ll have to imagine for a moment that the photo above is more symbolic and that there is nothing inside of the space, it is simply lots of space screwed up into a tiny ball. (bit of a stretch of the imagination required)
So that’s it, objects on space: I don’t believe; objects as space: totally makes sense to me, then your crazy entropy can be just unfolding and expanding space. Crazy! This means though that entropy would increase if the universe was to shrink.