Hi
I’ve been studying pharmacy/medical sciences for all my adult life when i stumbled upon “a brief history of time” by stephen hawking
Anyway,for a person who hasn’t studied physics much..how does “spacetime” exist? I mean einstein abandoned the idea of absolute time
But what is spacetime? And how does time exist as a physical dimension? I mean it’s just something we measure as it passes
How does all this exist?
In: 3
We’ve confirmed via experiment a couple different phenomena with time. Gravity causes clocks to run slower. If you could stand on the suface of Jupiter your watch would tick slower than standing on the surface of Earth. We also know that no matter how fast you are currently moving light always appears to move at the speed of light. Meaning if you were flying through space at like .25x the speed of light and a light beam passes you it would _appear to you_ as if the light were moving at the speed of light and not .75% the speed of light. In turn this means that for you moving at that speed your experience of time slows and your clock would be running slower than someone standing still.
This tells you a couple things. Mass and energy are fundamentally related and space and time are fundamentally related because mass collected into a defined space distorts the space AND time around it and mass moving through space with high energy slows time. So spacetime is what appears to be the same _thing_ affected by mass and energy.
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