Gravity is not a force – free-fall parabolas are straight lines in spacetime
I heard an interesting question at one point: "how come, when you throw a ball up on Earth, the parabola is so strongly curved? Spacetime is nearly flat, so how can a straight line become such a steep parabola?"I'll answer this question as I understand it, but I only took four lectures of General Relativity before I gave it up in favour of computability and logic, so if there is a more intuitive and/or less wrong answer out there, please correct me.Intuitive answer: the curve is indeed very gentle, and (e.g.) light will be deflected only very slightly by the curvature; but the ball is moving for a couple of seconds, and that's an eternity. On human scales, the time dimension is much "bigger" than the space dimensions (we're quite big in the time dimension and quite small in the spatial dimensions); the ball moves only a small distance through space but a very large distance through time, amounting to a big distance in spacetime, and so the slight curvature has a bigger effect than you might expect.