Or ripples in a table-cloth - the ripples gather the surrounding cloth, just like mass deforms spacetime.
These models are also an intuitive way to illustrate why the speed of light is a limit.
A ball rolling on a rubber sheet, or a boat on a lake, etc, can travel faster than waves in the rubber or water. So why can't matter travel faster than light? With ball-on-sheet type models, you need to resort to abstract relativity arguments about mass going to infinity, time slowing, causality, etc.
But if particles are actually just waves or knots or whirlpools or whatever, they clearly can't possibly travel faster than the speed of waves in the medium.
These models are also an intuitive way to illustrate why the speed of light is a limit.
A ball rolling on a rubber sheet, or a boat on a lake, etc, can travel faster than waves in the rubber or water. So why can't matter travel faster than light? With ball-on-sheet type models, you need to resort to abstract relativity arguments about mass going to infinity, time slowing, causality, etc.
But if particles are actually just waves or knots or whirlpools or whatever, they clearly can't possibly travel faster than the speed of waves in the medium.