Thread: moving space and time

This might sound dumb because I am only starting to learn about relativity, but I am having a problem understanding how space and time can move.
To make my question a bit more clear, since Relativity says that space and time are distorted by a mass and all the bodies I know of in space are moving then the distortion they cause must be moving too. Of course it follows that space and time must be able to move somehow if you can distort them, right?

So how do space and time move?

Space and time are just the way we measure the distance/time between events. These measurements are different for different observers depending on velocity, gravity, etc.

That is how I thought of space and just thought of time as one extra dimension. The problem is the relativity theory seems to regard space as an object that can be distorted instead of just an imaginary coordinate grid.

Originally Posted by dan hunter

That is how I thought of space and just thought of time as one extra dimension. The problem is the relativity theory seems to regard space as an object that can be distorted instead of just an imaginary coordinate grid.

That is just a problem with the way it is described. People talk about the "curvature of space-time" as if space-time is made of "stuff" but really it is just geometry: in relativity what we think of as straight lines (in either time or space) are not necessarily straight.