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
We are traveling through both space and time simultaneously. The basic idea is that the faster you are traveling through one, the slower you are traveling through the other. You perceive the passage of time from whatever frame of reference you are in as being the same. So a second would still feel like a second whether you are at a near standstill or at 90% of light speed and the watch you were wearing would still tick the same as far as you are concerned. It’s everything else outside of your frame of reference that appears to be ticking faster or slower relative to you.
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