how does time dilation works

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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

8 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Any physics you get from movies, take with a grain of salt.

So here’s the thing:

The speed of light in a vacuum is always constant no matter the reference frame.

This results in other values we believe are constant, distance and time, to be observed differently depending on their reference frame.

None of these effects are readily visualized because they only start to become significant at high speeds.

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