What about lightspeed makes it related to time. Why would really dense things distort time?
In: Physics
The speed of light is the fastest speed that anything can traverse space time. You could also call it the speed of information.
The sun disappears in a puff of smoke, we are still affected by its gravity for 8 minutes (we are 8 light minutes from the sun)
As for time dilation caused by dense things, it’s probably more simple to think of space and time as one thing. Spacetime.
When describing gravity, a lot of time you will see a flat plane with something large (large mass, therefore large gravity) creating a depression in the flat plane. Like putting a bowling ball on a spandex blanket.
Imagine that blanket can stretch almost infinitely from the weight of the bowling ball (the heavier the ball, the more it stretches).
If this spandex blanket were flat (nothing big is stretching it), it would take a certain amount of time for a moving object to go from one end to the other.
Now the blanket is severely stretched out by a very heavy object sitting on it. If we (on the undisturbed flat area where we are) we’re to observe that same object move across the stretched out area, it would seem to us that it takes longer to do so.
If we were on the moving object, we wouldn’t notice anything. We always experience one second per second. That’s why the term relativity is used. Appearing to move faster and slower through spacetime is always relative to some other observer. Not ourselves.
To your first point, light speed affecting time is similar to strong gravity forces. With spacetime there is a “speed limit” to how an observer would see you travel through space and time. Let’s say it’s “100”
If I’m moving 0 through space, I’m moving 100 through time. If I’m moving 25 through space, I’m moving 75 through time. So if you (the observer) are moving 100 through time and see me moving 75 through time because of how fast I am moving through space, you would see me moving slower through time. If you could see me on my spaceship moving fast through space, I would appear to you to be walking around the ship slower. The clock on my wall would tick slower.
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