can someone explain me the concept of time, like I know that black holes can distort time, but how?

Question

can someone explain me the concept of time, like I know that black holes can distort time, but how?

In: 19

Answer 1

Spoiler: I am not a physicist and this is just what little understanding I have of the subject.

Now, of course, time distortion doesn’t only happen around black holes. In fact the gravity of black holes isn’t any different than the gravity from any other object. The only difference is that the diameter of a black hole will be much smaller than the diameter of a star with comparable gravity, so objects can get much nearer to its center. But how does gravity work anyway?

Imagine a simple river. In the middle of the river the flow will be much faster than near the shores where the water will be slowed down by obstacles. If you placed to canoes on the river, on in the middle and the other one near the shore, the one in the middle would swin much faster and just pass by the other canoe. This is a comparison to two separate particles flying by a planet. One flies by really closely, where time goes slower, whereas the other one passes with some distance, where time will go faster. But most things are made up of more than one particle. Likes canoes.

What would happen if one of the paddlers would stick out their paddle and the other grabbed it, so that the canoes are locked together?

Well, the faster canoe in the middle of the river would be pulled towards the shore. It would move in a curved line as it is being held back by the slower canoe.

You can think of time as the water stream in the river. That flow of water in itself carries energy. Time in itself carries energy. When things get pulled to the shore, they lose some of their energy with which they move through time. This energy gets converted into the curved motion in space, which basically is gravity.

Oh, boy, you were asking about time… Hmm… I would think that as space and time are inseparable, they distort simultaneously.

Oh, man, I don’t think I added much to the discussion but it would also be too sad to just delete everything. So I’ll post it in the hope that someone finds it helpful.