Re: The Sun and The Photon .
Reply #18 –
Still no luck, but--- looking up curved spacetime stuff, I'm guessing that it's not unlike the "great circle" used in navigation. Light takes the shortest route between two points. If a heavy object-- say, a black hole-- twists the gravity fields around it, then the shortest distance for light to travel will follow the curve rather than try to shoot directly across. Or so the theory goes.
About that "Great Circle" thing: If you want to go from New York to Damascus by air, it won't take long to discover that the shortest apparent route on a map-- a straight line-- is actually longer than a curved route that follows the contour of the globe we live on. So, if you want to get there faster and consume less fuel doing it, you plot a "Great Circle" route between these two points. Of course the problems of answering thousands of questions about why you want to go from New York to Damascus in the present political climate could take awhile, but the actual trip could be figured out relatively easily by great circle navigation. I imagine something of the sort would have to be figured out if you need to navigate around a black hole in your star-hopping adventures in the future.