eli5 How can gravity affect time?

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Ik this might be a difficult one but I genuinely want to wrap my head around this

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12 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

That’s a really hard question because time is perceptional.

By that I mean humans felt a need to quantize the passage of time to a human scale…. think of it this way…how long is 100 years to humans,versus a Rock, versus a tree ,versus the Earth ,versus the universe. I know with 100% certainty the human will die in a hundred years, the 100 years to the universe is quicker than a flash.

Another good example of this is like trying to swat a fly, from the perception of the fly we’re a giant slow moving object, hence why they’re so damn hard to kill sometimes, or why like you can leave the house for an hour and your dog’s act like you’ve been gone for a whole day. … Time is in the eye of the observer.

….. Crap I didn’t even get the gravity,…

El5 is a little hard to explain quantum stuff….

Anonymous 0 Comments

It might be better to think of it the other way around. Mass distorts spacetime, causing a sort of drag on the flow of time. An object moving through this region of spacetime will experience a difference in time from one side to its other. Just like driving a car with a bigger wheel on one side, the object must follow a curved path through space. We think of a force causing that deflection as gravity, but it’s actually a straight line in spacetime.