I love the movie Interstellar but I have never fully understood how time dilation works. More recently reading “Project Hail Mary” this term came up again and I went on a Wikipedia binge trying to understand how it works.
How can time be different based on how fast you travel? Isn’t one second, one second everywhere? (I’m guessing not otherwise there would be no time dilation) but I just don’t understand what causes it or how to wrap my head around it
In: Physics
It helps to not think of time as some universal unmaliable property. There is an reason why we call it “Space Time”, that is because space and time usually are connected together always, when you bend space (gravity) you also end up affecting time. This is why time is the 4th dimesion, with 3 different space dimensions.
Right now, no one knows why time actually warps when observers compare clocks. All we know is that if it didn’t work this way, the universe would be completely different place.
So thus when you move fast towards the speed of light, you experience time exponentially slower in the perspectives of whatever your measuring your speed to, while you always experince time at a normal rate to yourself.
Also no matter what reference frame you compare, the speed of light or the speed limit is the same.
When looking at things that goes at the speed of light such as a photon, we see them go at max space speed, but zero time speed.
Photons (light) also very rarely actually reaches the speed limit of the universe as it gets slowed down in many cases. Which is why scientists have calculated photons have an life span of on average of 3 years, but to us non speedsters, they last for a billion billion years.
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