Welcome to Gaia! ::

Mmm... Pirates... Just not the ones that the Science department students dress up as. There's something disturbing about taking a train with pirates who are discussing quantum theory.

JoVo Nexus: For instance, a world-line is the sequence of events labeled through space-time of an object.
JoVo Nexus: Example, Earth's world-line would be an ellipse, since Earth always goes around the sun, but since it arrives at the same point a year later (a different time) then the Earth's world-line is actually a helix through four-dimensional space.
VerhextSelbst: Woah, that made my head hurt.
JoVo Nexus: Well, technically not "four-dimensional space."
JoVo Nexus: Since four-dimensional space includes time, then it's actually four-dimensional spacetime, but spacetime is already four-dimensional, so that's redundant.
JoVo Nexus: The right word is maniford. The Earth's world-line is a helix through a four-dimensional manifold that traverses spacetime and within which points are calculated by four coordinates (three for space and one for time).
JoVo Nexus: Of course, because a four-dimensional manifold is difficult to imagine, then you suppress two of the space coordinates, so you end up with a two-dimensional manifold, otherwise called a plane, and the Earth's world-line looks like a squiggle.
JoVo Nexus: How was that?
VerhextSelbst: -smiles and nods-
JoVo Nexus: I like physics! biggrin
VerhextSelbst: I can tell!
JoVo Nexus: You know there's actually a physical process called "spagghettification"?
VerhextSelbst: Really?
JoVo Nexus: That's what happens when an object approaches the event horizon of a black hole. Since time begins to dialate and the curvature of spacetime is beginning to approach infinity, then the object becomes red-shifted and appears to stretch out like a spaghetti string, until it becomes nearly invisible.
JoVo Nexus: That's spaghettification!
VerhextSelbst: I know about that! I saw it in a movie!
JoVo Nexus: O:
JoVo Nexus: So now you know what the process is called, and you can impress all of your friends! biggrin

Hawking is always my first step when I research anything for any of my sci-fi stories.

rofl

I'll thank you not to refer to male circumcision as remotely comparable to the female version. The former does not permanently cripple the human as the latter does. Most of the men I know happen to be circumcized, and their parts still do what they're supposed to.