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Not a physicist here but something has been puzzling me for a while. As I understand gravity in General Relativity, it bends the space time as this Picture. Now this is all nice and elegant if I look at the problem from the plane of trajectory perspective.

My real question is this. A planet is a three dimensional object. So the space "bending" has to be done in a three dimensional ( or more) way such that every time I limit myself to a plane perspective passing through the center of the planet. I get the original linked picture.

So I guess my question is, how is space being really bent? Is there a way to bend it in 3D that I am not aware of? or is there an extra invisible dimension being involved?

Qmechanic
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Sam
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    Those "rubber sheet" pictures are misleading because it's 4D spacetime that's curved, not just 3D space. The curvature of space is not even an objective thing because it depends on which 3D surfaces in spacetime we define to be our spatial surfaces. Here's one way to visualize curvature of spacetime, although I'm afraid it may be even farther from what you are looking for, since it goes down to 1 spatial dimension. – Sten Oct 17 '22 at 06:51

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