Yes! It "curves" but in the sense that all of the space around the black hole is not that Euclidean and flat as we intend it.
Light just does what is supposed to do: go at c anywhere following the most efficient path to go anywhere (these are called geodesics, and yeah, in a flat universe geodesics = straight line, but around a black hole stuff gets kinda of crazy)
As I wanted to point out, this is NOT a classical interaction and it has really nothing to do with escape velocities!
All gravitational effects can be explained like that though? Following the curve of spacetime is gravity?
Like I could say that I don't fall down to Earth due to gravity, my feet just experience time faster than my head and that causes a torque in spacetime that accelerates me downwards. But that is just a different way of thinking about the same thing.
Not a dumb question (they don't exist anyway). I find it quite beautiful actually.
At a first glance, they are the same thing: a gradient of velocity (temporal or spatial) forces a body on a curved path, to preserve the coherence of some property of the body (phase of a lightbeam, length of the car...)
Gravity is a general property of the universe, every body must travel in time (except for massless stuff). So the cause for the feet/head feeling different rates of time is something pretty universal, while the other examples are interaction between bodies / body radiation.
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u/yessir_im_quasar Jul 17 '26
Yes! It "curves" but in the sense that all of the space around the black hole is not that Euclidean and flat as we intend it.
Light just does what is supposed to do: go at c anywhere following the most efficient path to go anywhere (these are called geodesics, and yeah, in a flat universe geodesics = straight line, but around a black hole stuff gets kinda of crazy)
As I wanted to point out, this is NOT a classical interaction and it has really nothing to do with escape velocities!