The Sun stands at the origin as a yellow sphere; the Earth begins at the Vernal Equinox point of its orbit, drawn on a flat plane through the origin. The vertical axis is time: each day the whole plane — Sun, orbit, and the celestial sphere whose equator it is — rises by one day’s step, while the Earth advances along the orbit. The Earth’s positions, one per day, are kept as a trace: the year unwinds as a spiral about the Sun’s rising line, which is itself the axis of time.
What this figure draws is a dimensional theory of gravity and time. Its difference from general relativity lies in the treatment of time itself: where relativity weaves time into spacetime as a dimension of its own distinct character, here time is seen from a spatial perspective — as a way of considering higher dimensions of space. The vertical axis is not a clock face but a distance. The sphere represents this universe, and its rise along that axis is the universe’s own travel through time; the plane of its equator — the Ecliptic, where Sun and Earth both stand — is the three-dimensional space they share at every moment.
The figure therefore shows two paths through four-dimensional space: the Sun’s, the short straight line of the central axis, and the Earth’s, the long spiral wound about it. To arrive at the same moment, the Earth travels the greater distance.
For the two bodies to remain on the same plane — and so within the same three-dimensional space — they are forced to compensate within the plane itself: by orbiting, or by falling freely toward the larger body. Orbit and free fall are the two faces of this compensation, and through it the centers of gravity of the two bodies are drawn together. What appears within the plane as gravitation appears in the whole figure as the difference between a shorter and a longer path through the higher dimension of space that time, on this view, is.
The orbit is the true ellipse of the Earth, eccentricity 0.0167 with the Sun at the focus, and the daily positions are computed from Kepler’s equation, so the Earth genuinely runs faster near perihelion in early January and slower near aphelion in July. The tropical year is 365.2422 days; the calendar year of 365 days therefore ends just short of a full revolution — short by 0.239 degrees of the return to the equinox — and the animation ends exactly there. The spiral does not close: the calendar lands on March 20 again while the Earth has not quite come home, which is the whole reason leap years exist.
The great sphere is divided longitudinally into twelve equal sections with latitude lines every thirty degrees, and its equator — the moving plane itself — is the Ecliptic, labeled as such and bearing the twelve signs of the zodiac, one within each division. Aries begins exactly at the Vernal Equinox point and the signs proceed in the direction of the Sun’s apparent motion: the tropical arrangement, in which the signs are measured from the equinox rather than from the constellations. The line from the Earth’s center through the Sun’s center, extended to the sphere’s inner surface, marks the Sun’s apparent place as seen from the Earth; because Earth and Sun share the plane, the endpoint always falls exactly on the equator, where it can be read directly against the twelve divisions. The line persists and swings through the year, but only the Earth’s path is traced.
At day zero the pointer’s endpoint is the Vernal Equinox point of the sphere — the zero of celestial longitude — and it is marked there in gold, riding upward with the sphere through the year. A second gold label stands on the plane at the Earth’s own starting position in the orbit. When the calendar year ends, the pointer has returned almost, but not exactly, to the marked point above where it began.