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They call it the "fabric of reality" because that's a good metaphor to describe how gravity works. (Or at least I assume that's where it came from, I could very well be wrong.)
When you stretch a fabric thin, and place something heavy in it, it's going to sink and stretch the fabric down with it. Then, if you place a smaller object next to the larger one, it's going to roll around the larger one, gradually moving closer as it goes down the slope created by the larger object.
That might be hard to visualize, so here's a neat video I found.
Edit: guys I think you're reading too much into this I wasn't trying to provide a foolproof explanation of how gravity works I was just trying to relate an interesting metaphor to a piece of linguistics.
And I wasn't even right, a quick google search says the term predates our understanding of the universe. Its probably a coincidence.
One could be picky and say you're explaining gravity with gravity. But for the sake of simplicity that's OK.
I've once read an article where someone complained about that and tried to explain it with the actual cause, curvature of space time, like using a model car with glue attached to the wheels. But that was not really intuitive and simple to understand.
I think of it as a 2d cross section of the experiment (it’s happening in every direction possible tangent to the ball), which necessarily breaks into a third dimension. In our 3-spatial-dimension reality that’s the best we can do.
Yes, but the smaller object is dragged into the valley formed by a heavier object due to gravity (of the earth), not due to following the curvature of the blanket.
Sure but it is still a cross-section of what it is — something with a mass of that bowling ball being gravitationally attracted to something the mass of Earth. The blanket is a demonstration of what spacetime is doing (how it’s being warped) by the gravitational attraction. It so happens that you can also sort of demonstrate how another object can be influenced by the bowling ball’s gravity as it’s being gravitationally attracted by something else (like how a small object would be attracted to the moon which is still being attracted to Earth). Given that nothing can really ever be gravitationally unbound, I think it’s a fine demonstration. I wonder if you’re expecting it would demonstrate something it isn’t demonstrating (like how an object in isolation would influence some other object in isolation).