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🌌 Advanced Physics: Spacetime Curvature & Time Dilation

Interactive advanced-physics simulation: watch a massive body curve the spacetime grid around it, bend a passing light ray, and slow down the clock of an orbiting observer in real time.

Physics & Mechanics3DModerate60 FPS

Advanced physics unifies gravity, motion and time into one picture: mass curves the geometry of spacetime itself, and anything moving through that curved geometry — a planet, a light ray, an observer's own clock — follows the shape it creates. This simulation makes that abstraction visible and adjustable.

🔬 What It Demonstrates

A wireframe grid stands in for spacetime; the central mass dents it exactly like a rubber sheet, y(r) = −k·M / √(r² + r₀²). A green observer orbits along that curve while a yellow light ray sweeping past is deflected more sharply the closer it passes to the mass — the same qualitative effect that bends starlight during a solar eclipse.

🎮 How to Use

Raise Central mass to deepen the well and bend the light ray harder. Orbit speed (v/c) sets how fast the observer moves as a fraction of light speed, which drives its Lorentz factor γ and how far its proper time τ lags behind coordinate time t. Simulation speed scales playback; toggle the light ray on or off; Restart zeroes both clocks.

💡 Did You Know?

The proper-time lag you see between τ and t here is the same mechanism — time dilation, Δτ = Δt / γ — that keeps GPS satellite clocks in sync with ground clocks only after correcting for both their orbital speed and the weaker gravity they sit in.

⚙ Under the hood

Watch a massive body curve the spacetime grid around it, bend a passing light ray, and slow down the clock of an orbiting observer in real time — an interactive tour through general relativity's core ideas.

Three.jsGeneral RelativitySpacetimeInstancedMesh

3D · Three.js / WebGL renderer · 60 FPS target · runs fully client-side, no install