Eli5: How does gravity affect time, dumb it down for me as much as possible
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Another way to think about it. Gravity does not actually wield a power over time. Gravity doesn’t affect time in that manner. Gravity and time are affected in different ways by the same thing. As Einstein said a couple different ways, they relate. The bigger the thing, the more affect. Bigger objects (technically mass-ier. Bigger in this sense supposes similar composition. There are stars smaller than earth with exponentially more mass stuffed inside, but that’s not pertinent.) create a lensing effect.
If you’ve ever used a flash light that costs more than a couple dollars, it likely had an adjustable beam. You twist or move up/down the lens end and the beam gets wider or more narrow. That’s the light refracting through a curved lens. Light shown through a flat pane like your window has no (very little) change to its path, but the curved lens (like a straw in a glass of water) alters the path. Gravity bends space like a lens bends light and splits your straw in two.
Think about that flat window pane but its not rigid glass. It’s a pane of stretchy rubber balloon-like material. Now sit a planet on that stretchy material. What happens? It sinks. It pulls that rubber into a kind of cone shape (viewed from the side) and an ever smaller hole in the middle (viewed from the top). That well created by the heavy object is a material depiction of what gravity does to space and it’s related time.
Now, the part that un-busts your brain, hopefully. When you’re being silly with a friend or stranger or whatever and you say something “something”. They don’t hear and you repeat, but slower “soooommmeeettthiiiinnnngggg”. That’s the same word- same syllables simply stretched out, taking more time.
Now, take away the words with friends and picture the word “time” written on that rubber in black marker. When you sit a planet on your rubber pane, that black “time” is now little more than black lines stretched so far the word is no longer legible.
That black marker “time” is relative time. That rubber is space itself. The planet sitting on it is gravity. The super stretched word is the answer to your question. Gravity, generated by mass, pulls on space. Time is something humans made up and wrote across the flat plane as a measuring device. When we see more gravity (mass heavy objects) we see more stretching of that word. Time becomes ttttiiiiiiiimmmmmmeeeeeee, which is clearly longer. 😀
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