I rewatched “Interstellar” and the time dilation dilemma makes my brain hurt. If a change in gravity alters time then wouldn’t you feel a difference entering/exiting said fake planet?
In: Planetary Science
No. We cannot perceive time. None of our senses have an innate connection to time.
The only way we can perceive time is through secondary effects: watching things change.
Time dilation occurs only relative to someone else’s frame of reference. When you’re on the planet, time doesn’t go any faster for you, it only goes faster when compared to someone orbiting the planet.
The fundamental idea here is that time is not absolute, it can change, but only relative to other frames of reference. If you looked at the orbiting ship, it would appear to be moving very fast. If the ship looked at you, you would appear to be moving very slow. Each of you would see things near you moving at normal speeds.
The difference only becomes apparent when viewing a region of spacetime with a drastically different gravitational field.
One thing the movie doesn’t tell you is that for a large difference like this to occur (1 hour = 22 years?), the gravitational difference between the two regions would have to be massive. It would never happen the way it does in the movie. Brand and Coop would need to be essentially on top of the event horizon for a difference like this to manifest.
If I remember correctly, you only start to see drastic dilation when you’re very close to the speed of light (80% or greater for example). For something like this to happen, you’d probably need to be doing 99.9%, or whatever the equivalent gravitational gradient is.
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