🔄FROM THE ARCHIVE: Time depends on speed and mass, which means it's not as consistent as we think.
We conventionally think of time as something simple and fundamental. It flows uniformly, independent of everything else, from the past to the future, measured by clocks and watches. In the course of time, the events of the universe succeed each other in an orderly way: pasts, presents, futures. The past is fixed, the future open ... and yet all of this has turned out to be false.
It is not just the clocks that slow down: Lower down, all processes are slower. Two friends separate, with one of them living in the plains and the other going to live in the mountains. They meet up again years later. The one who has stayed down has lived less, aged less, the mechanism of his cuckoo clock has oscillated fewer times. He has had less time to do things, his plants have grown less, his thoughts have had less time to unfold. Lower down, there is simply less time than at an altitude.
In the course of making such strides, we learn the things that seemed self-evident to us were really no more than prejudices. It seemed obvious the sky was above us and not below; otherwise, the Earth would fall down. It seemed self-evident the Earth did not move; otherwise, it would cause everything to crash. That time passed at the same speed everywhere seemed equally obvious to us.
Therefore, if things fall, it is due to this slowing of time. Where time passes uniformly, in interplanetary space, things don’t fall — they float. Here on the surface of our planet, on the other hand, things fall downward because, down there, time is slowed by the Earth. As before, the two friends experience different durations. The one who moves ages less quickly, his watch marks less time passing, he has less time in which to think, the plant he is carrying takes longer to germinate, and so on. For everything that moves, time passes more slowly.
Einstein, though, grasped its significance. t is the time that passes if I stay still; t´ is “your time.” That is, t is the time my watch measures when it’s stationary, and t´ is the time your watch measures when it’s moving. Nobody had imagined previously that time could be different for a stationary watch and one in motion.
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