I’ve heard people talk about how people living on a space station their whole lives would age at different rates to people on Earth but…how?
In: Physics
Hafele–Keating experiment actually showed this, they put a clock on board commercial aircrafts and fly around the world, then compare to a clock at a fixed position.
The effects is minimal, but it’s technically there, and more pronounced for people flying around in orbit.
As for how could that happen. You have to abandon the naive idea of time and space. The naive idea is that space that time is like 1 coordinate, and at each instant in time, everything happen in a 3 dimensional Euclidean space; the totality of space and time formed a 4-dimensional Euclidean hyperspace, and how much time something happened is just the difference between 2 time coordinate at the beginning and the end. But the more correct idea is that spacetime is combined into a 4-dimensional hyperspace, without separated time nor space coordinate, and the amount of time is actually the “length” of the path in that space, and between 2 points on spacetime there are no fixed time difference; different object moving between 2 points can actually move in different path and thus experience different amount of time.
I hope that’s an understandable ELI5. Different paths between the same 2 points can have different length.
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