About Spacetime Simulations
Spacetime Simulations is an educational site for exploring black holes, wormholes, and curved spacetime through interactive visualizations and carefully written explainers. The goal is simple: help students, teachers, and curious readers build accurate intuition—without sensational claims.
Who we are
The site is maintained by the Spacetime Simulations editorial project (contact: spacetimesim@gmail.com). Content is written to prioritize established ideas from general relativity and related astrophysics education, with clear labels when a topic is still theoretical or speculative.
About the author
Hi, I'm Katie Dilmitis. Spacetime Simulations started life as my final-year mathematics dissertation, where I set out to answer a question that had followed me around for years: what would it actually look like to stand near a black hole, or to peer into a wormhole? The chapter notes on this site are that dissertation, from the tensor calculus right through to the ray-tracing code behind the simulators.
I have always had a soft spot for the world, and especially for the parts of it we don't understand yet. There is something wonderful about the fact that a few lines of mathematics can tell us how starlight bends around something no one can ever see directly. If this site sparks even a little of that wonder for you, it has done its job. Thank you for visiting.
How the simulations work
Our tools generate diagrams and lensed images from mathematical models used in teaching contexts:
- Black hole image simulation approximates how light rays bend near a compact mass, so a background image appears warped.
- Embedding diagrams show a 2D spatial slice as a surface in a higher-dimensional plot—useful for intuition, not a literal “shape of the universe.”
- Wormhole embeddings let you vary geometric parameters (such as throat size) and see how the visualized bridge changes.
These are educational visualizations. They are not observatory pipelines, and they do not replace peer-reviewed research software.
What we publish
- Long-form articles on horizons, shadows, Hawking radiation, wormholes, and related misconceptions
- Chapter notes for readers who want more mathematical detail
- FAQ covering common questions (including film-inspired ones, answered carefully)
Sources and standards
Explanations draw on standard general-relativity concepts (Schwarzschild/Kerr geometry, geodesics, gravitational lensing) and publicly discussed results such as black-hole imaging and gravitational-wave detections. Where popular media oversimplifies, we say so. Where physics is unsettled (for example, information paradox proposals), we frame it as an open research topic.
Background imagery on the site uses the Milky Way panorama credited to ESO/S. Brunier (ESO image eso0932a), shown after educational distortion in demos.
Advertising
Spacetime Simulations uses Google AdSense to keep the educational tools free to use. Ads are intended for content pages (articles, FAQ, chapters). See our Privacy Policy for cookie and third-party details.