195
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2024
195 points (92.2% liked)
science
14464 readers
808 users here now
just science related topics. please contribute
note: clickbait sources/headlines aren't liked generally. I've posted crap sources and later deleted or edit to improve after complaints. whoops, sry
Rule 1) Be kind.
lemmy.world rules: https://mastodon.world/about
I don't screen everything, lrn2scroll
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
What does it mean to move slower through time?
That's another great question that unlocks another incredibly strange point about reality.
You're only moving faster/slower through space/time to an outside observer. Your own rate of time and your own velocity through space will always feel centered on you, and it will always look like the rest of the universe that is slowing or accelerating.
And in fact, another mind-melty point behind relativity is that if you jump out of a 20th story window, there is no action that says you're falling, instead the action is saying that you have changed your velocity (or altered Earth's velocity in respect to your acceleration) and now the rest of the world is passing you very rapidly. It would feel like Earth and the building and everything else is wooshing past you while you stand still. And that's a correct perspective. It is rushing past you, you are sitting still in space. (The problem comes when that wall of asphalt and dirt swings past and doesn't miss you.)
If you fall into a black hole where spacetime is distorted as far as we can imagine, to you nothing will feel different (at first) you will see the whole universe seem to roll into a tight ball behind you and it will look like it's in rapid-motion if you pointed a telescope into it, you would see stars being born and galaxies fading and the entire future of the universe will rush past and you will hit the singularity at the death of the back hole, some billions and billions and of years into the future. If you could magically escape right before you get pulled apart, you would find the entire universe has died outside and all the stars have gone out.
Wow that’s amazing to think about
Time passes more slowly for you than for an outside observer, e.g., if you are moving to some place, for someone on the outside, your journey could take decades, while for yourself only minutes pass.
So moving faster at some point starts to become slower because everything around you has the benefit of having more time to move?
They're talking about time dilation.
Objects with no mass traveling at light speed in a vacuum don't experience time.
A photon, traveling through a vacuum for forty years, from its perspective, leaves the instant it arrives.
Likewise, if you can travel at the speed of light for forty years and came back to earth, your twin would age forty years and you wouldn't age at all.
At a much smaller scale we have to use time dilation to keep clocks in space running at the same time as clocks on Earth. Because in geosynchronous orbit they are traveling faster than objects on the ground.