What should we believe?

Einstein, after a long a successful career came up with an unusual statement.

He talked something about the bending of space and time, which has been used by a lot of people to confuse the issue.  This is my view on the issue.

I thought that when I first heard it, that it was only referring to Black Hole incidents.

Now it has been expanded enough that I can talk about it

It is even used to explain away Gravity, now it is just a change in space time continuum

What is space     Just the distance between objects.

What is time     The measurement of how long it takes for things to happen

Now, something that just happens to change in direct relation to the mass of the objects can no longer be called gravity (according the new definition) but is only the bending of space and time.   Since it is according to the mass of the objects,  I still prefer Gravity

Where did this all start?  with the bending of light caused by a mass.  Using Newton equations, light was predicted to bend a certain amount when it passed near the sun.  Einstein developed equations to show that it would bend nearly twice the amount predicted.  When an occasion came that it could be tested, Einstein was right.

This showed that light was not fully understood, and that it did bend according to gravity, even if we were wrong on the amount of the bend.  We think of light as travelling at a constant speed, not remembering that this is referring to speed in a vacuum.  Therefore, we often use light to measure distances.  Any curving of the light would mean that it covered different distances, and therefor would take different time.

The result of this curvature can be used to help understand incidents near a Black Hole.  At some short distance, from any Black Hole light would be held by gravity in an orbit around the black hole if it was arriving at the correct angle.  This has been defined incorrectly as the event horizon.   Some people do admit that things happen closer than this to a Black Hole, but the fact that light can not report them is used to cloud up the facts.  We sometimes even get our thoughts even further clouded and confused by what we hear in Science Fiction.

It is possible that the temperature is not always the same at the point where light orbits a Black Hole.  Do we have any way of measuring temperatures at further distances?   I know that not all stars are the same temperature.   Even on the International Space Station, the extreme changes in temperature have to be dealt with carefully.  This is just a hint at some of the many things that can be considered.

Gravity is a convenient way of predicting the effects of objects on each other.  Light is one of those objects, even if we are still struggling to understand it better.  We have to be careful when using light to measure time and distance, because it sometimes is affected by the mass of other objects.