How Space and Time Fuse Together to Form “Spacetime”

originally posted by: whereislogic

originally posted by: Arbitrageur
a reply to: andy06shake
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Evidence found that spinning black holes drag spacetime

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--Avid Star Trek fans--and physicists--have known that spacetime gets distorted near certain galactic objects, ...

In light of my previous comment, if one were to re-phrase the bolded part to "relativity works differently near certain galactic objects", would one still be talking about the same subject?

You call it "re-phrasing" but that's not what I call it. I call it changing a correct statement into an incorrect statement.

Take a stepladder for example. Go up one step and jump off, you hit the ground with a certain impact. Go up two steps and jump off and you hit the ground with a greater impact, and so on. I would not say "gravity works differently as you jump off higher steps on the ladder". It's exactly the same equations of gravity that calculate your impact from jumping off step 1 as for step 2, so gravity is working to exactly the same equation, it's not working differently.

Likewise for relativity near a black hole, the same equations of relativity apply whether you're near the black hole or not, you just see the effects much more prominently near a black hole. If you're a long way from the black hole and you don't notice the warping, that's exactly what relativity predicts, and if you're near a black hole and notice the warping, that's also what relativity predicts, so relativity is still behaving the way the relativity maths predict, at any distance. The inputs and outputs of the equation differ, but it's still the same equation describing how relativity works.