Eli5: How does gravity affect time, dumb it down for me as much as possible
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Space and time are the same thing called spacetime. So you can’t impact one without impacting the other. So gravity is not just distorting space, it’s distorting spacetime which affects time as well because space and time are not independent things.
Why are they linked? It seems that everything moves through spacetime at the same speed, which is the speed of light. Yes, that includes you, too.
How is that possible? Think of two glasses of water where one represents time and the other represents space. The total amount of water from the two glasses is your speed through spacetime. If you want to go faster through space you have to pour some of the water from the time glass into the space glass and so now you’re going through time more slowly.
What happens when your time glass is empty and all of the water is in the space glass? Now you’re going through space at light speed and so you experience 0 time. You also can’t go any faster through space because you have no more water from time to re-assign.
This is why there’s a universal speed limit (light speed). It’s really just the speed that everything moves at and there’s not really any difference to speed except for how it’s perceived in dimensions of space vs time which appear to be distinct things but actually aren’t.
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