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
You can imagine that time is just distance in the next dimension up from where we see things.
So you can draw a line where every inch is a minute.
Now imagine a map of mountainous terrain. You can draw a line straight across a mountain that’s 6 inches long.
Your can then draw that same line on flat land.
The top down view is normal time. Everybody’s line is equal to the same amount of time
Now imagine looking sideways at the line on the train. The flat terrain line stays the the same distance but the mountain terrain line gets way longer because it has to stretch up in the air and then back down.
This is line dilation and the line represents time. So from a top down view you had the same amount of time, but on the ground, one time took longer to go the same distance.
Mountains in the this analogy are gravity wells or relativistic effects
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