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I’ve been trying to wrap my head around general relativity, and it seems to me that what Einstein really did was give up the idea of a perfect Euclidean space.

We idealize the fundamentals of physics so much that sometimes it’s difficult to pull back and look at the bigger picture.

What if the universe is just a shotgun blast of gravitational wells? What if the space we live in is locally and globally warped? What would that look like? Would we be able to notice?

How would that affect our measurements?

Thanks.

WTFisChris
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I'm not sure what your question is; Einstein's general relativity is based on non-Euclidean space/time, and the universe really is a scattershot of locally warped space here and there, in the form of gravitational potential wells surrounding every massive object in it: this is exactly what the universe "looks like" and we do indeed notice it, in the form of things like accidentally-formed gravitational lenses on astronomical distance scales and on the paths traced out by our satellite probes within the solar system as those satellites make their way amongst the planets.

If by "global warpage" you mean the cosmological constant and how it affects things like the Hubble expansion rate over the lifetime of the universe, we can measure that too, so it is also part of what our universe "looks like".

niels nielsen
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