This took about 2 mins to conceive, 20 mins to build and then about 2 hours trying to get cycles to work, but it wouldn’t. In the end, I just used Matcap and the world background in and OpenGL animation.
It is a model using physics to illustrate physics. Let me explain…
When there is anything with mass it bends space-time. A black hole has a lot of mass and bends space-time a lot. That’s how we know they are there. They emit no light but they bend light coming from other stars giving a lensing effect. There is a black hole at the bottom of the bowl which represents warped space-time.
The balls are events or objects moving along the space-time horizon. When they collide you have ‘same space, same time’ so you witness an event.
Might sound like science fiction but all this was postulated in 1905 by Einstien. So nothing new here. Originally I tried to make the bowl flexible like cloth so that each ball would deform space locally. This would be more realistic. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get the bowl to act like a stretchy material with the balls on it. But I think the illustration is good none the less.