How a clock in outer space moves more quickly than a clock on Earth
In: Physics
In physics 101 you’ll learn about something called “relativity”, or more properly “classical relativity”. The idea in a nutshell is that motion is not absolute, it’s something that only exists as a comparison, *this thing relative to that thing*.
Let me give you an example – you’re floating in black space, you can see nothing just pure black space. Suddenly I appear and slowly float by you, I wave, you wave, and I keep floating on by into the distance.
Who was moving in that example? Were you stationary and I floated by? Was I stationary and you floated by? Were we both moving a little bit? Maybe you and I were both actually fired from cannons moving insanely quickly and you were just a tad bit faster giving the appearance that I was moving past you? *It doesn’t matter*. Neither of us had, by ourselves, a property of ‘motion’ motion only exists as the comparison between us and we could say “I was moving *relative to you* by X feet per second”.
So we had this math for centuries and life was good. But here’s the trick – Newton didn’t have lasers and atomic clocks and computers to measure things insanely accurately so it was all round numbers for him. Come the late 1800’s when were did start having at least fancier equipment we discovered the “classical relativity” equations *didn’t work*. There was “missing energy” and that was a problem.
In a nutshell Newton said if I push on something ‘this’ hard it’ll move ‘this fast’. If you push 2x as hard, it’ll move 2x as fast. What we learned was if you push 2x as fast, it’ll move 1.99999999x times as fast and that doesn’t work for physics, you can’t have missing energy.
What Einstein proposed was that that missing 0.000000000001x of motion basically became motion in *time*. That when you push on things, and they move faster you’re actually pushing them *into a different time*, sorta.
So cutting this short, it’s not that “being in space” makes clocks weird, it’s that we can make things in space move really really really really really fast compared to something on Earth. So if I made 2 clocks and synchronized them perfectly and kept one in New Jersey and the sent the other up into space on a satellite and made it orbit the Earth at a bazillion miles an hour *relative to the New Jersey clock*, the two clocks are now in “in different times” just like they are moving at different speeds.
And yes, we’ve done this exact experiment as I suggested and it does work exactly as I suggested. To make it observable the relative different in motion needs to be HUGE like thousands and thousands of miles an hour different and/or over a long time. I think when we really did the experiment the two clocks were only out of sync by a fraction of second.
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