Gravity Visualized by High School Teacher in an Amazingly Elegant & Simple Way

Just a few miles down the high­way from Open Cul­ture’s gleam­ing head­quar­ters you will find Los Gatos High School, where Dan Burns, an AP Physics Teacher, has fig­ured out a sim­ple but clever way to visu­al­ize grav­i­ty, as it was explained by Ein­stein’s 1915 Gen­er­al The­o­ry of Rel­a­tiv­i­ty. Get $20 of span­dex, some mar­bles, a cou­ple of weights, and you’re all good to go. Using these read­i­ly-avail­able objects, you can demon­strate how mat­ter warps space-time, how objects grav­i­tate towards one anoth­er, and why objects orbit in the way they do. My favorite part comes at the 2:15 mark, where Burns demon­strates the answer to a ques­tion you’ve maybe pon­dered before: why do all plan­ets hap­pen to orbit the sun mov­ing in a clock­wise (rather than counter-clock­wise) fash­ion? Now you can find out why.

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