I understand that space travel affects time, but why would it affect the mechanisms of a watch? doesn’t it just go tiktik u know?
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You can look up time dilation. A clock on the ISS is technically .01 seconds delayed every 12 months compared to one on earth. Velocity and distance to a massive body impact time dilation. Same with interstellar. A clock on a near the edge of a black whole would experience time much slower being so close to a heavy mass.
Space doesn’t affect time, velocity and acceleration do, if Im not mistake. Einstein explains this very clearly in his Theory of General Relativity, which you can find in full text and read on the internet. Others who are smarter about physics can explain the relativity of time here on this thread.
The mechanism inside the watch work the same. It is time itself that runs slower.
The clock will still go tick-tock at the same rate it is just that time itself is slowed down or sped up depending on from where you look at it. To the person looking at the clock it will work the same.
It is not even just space.
You can have time pass at different speeds here on earth. High mountains and deep valleys have time pass at different speeds.
The effect is however so small that we can barely measure it.
Once you get away from Earth you can get much greater differences.
So a watch’s second-hand motion is 6 degrees per second, which gives a full rotation of 360 degrees per minute. But what constitutes a minute is different depending on your frame of reference.
From my perspective, a minute on my watch passes every one of my minutes (I know this sounds tautological but stay with me). But from your perspective, a minute on my watch passes every 10 of your minutes. So the clock moves at 0.6 degrees per second from your perspective but 6 degrees per second from mine.
A good thing to look up (which may help explain a lot, even if it’s not directly on topic & may contain information that’s harder to understand) would be NASA’s twin experiment. If I’m remembering it correctly, one went up to space while the other stayed here on earth. It should definitely be interesting for ya.
The key thing is that *everything* observes a different “speed” of time, yourself included, not just the watch. You wouldn’t realize that the watch is moving faster, and neither does the watch. To you and everything that is around you everything appears as normal. It’s not the watch that is behaving differently, but time itself. It’s only when you return to earth and compare watches do you realize the difference.
A lot of the comments use special relativity, which means time of someone moving fast is observed differently by the other, but it indeed goes equally fast. It just looks slower.
However, the question did not specify speed, only “space”. The difference there is gravity: almost zero in space, much bigger on earth. This needs general relativity. The higher your gravity, the slower time goes by. So the oscillations in your clock effectively go slower, because of gravity. In this case it’s not just an observed difference, but an actual difference.
different areas of expertiese with different themes here
– First lets discuss how a watch works.
2 types of commonly used watches today, Mechanical source and electrical source.
– Mechanial source watches use a spring which releases force, this force is controlled by an escapement which uses the vibration of a sping to move sideways to control a brake which stops the and starts the release of power, this is done between 18000 and 1,000,000 a minute but most commonly 21,600 and 28,800 times. these watches are VERY sensative to acceleration, impacts and sudden movements, a master watchmaker called Abraham-Louis Breguet inveted the tourbillon which is a escapement which spins on its own axis to improve this, but it was mostly cosmetic. these watches are accurate to betweet 2 seconds a day and 1 minute a day, depending between a watch like a Rolex or a Grand Seiko which are guarnteed to run under 2 seconds a day, to a Russian Vostok which feels like its made from left over coke cans. you have to understand that people mostly buy them for nustalgic and engnieering reasons, i wear a mechanical seiko chronograph myself, and nasa still uses the Speedmaster Pro which is a mechanical chronograph which was due to be replaced by the Omega Speedmaster X33 but they prefered the old mechanical.
– Electric source, This is where the mechanism is powered by a electrical motor, originally they used a electric motor replacing the mainspring in a mechanical watch, then moved to the bulova accutron which used a tunning fork occilator as a regulating mechanism, then in 1969 Seiko introduced the astron which used a 8Khz quartz crystal allowing a 4 second per day accuracy. today they use a 32Khz quartz cristal, this works on the piezoelectric where when an ionic crystal (a crystal composed of positive and negative ions) is compressed it produces current, now the inverse works as well, so if you cut a quartz crystal to the correct shape (a tunning fork) and apply current to it, you can get an exact vibration requency, which is 32Khz, this gives it an accuracy of 0.5 Seconds per day (yes, a 10 buck F91-W “taliban” is more accurate then a Rolex Oyster Perpetual), and there are high frequcncy or thermocompensated quartz watches that take it to 10 seconds per YEAR, Now the reason why Quartz watches tick is becuase the first quartz watches were power hungry, and they found that moving the seconds hand 1 per second instead of having it move continously saved battery, usually this was a feature on mechanical watches called a dead second and was very respected and desired, the quartz watch basically killed it.
now the space agencies of the world are more worried about batteries exploding then the accuracy of mechanical watches so many have stuck to mechanicals for a long time but we have seen many quartz watches go to space once the batteries were certified to not be ticking time bombs when exposed to the acceleration and radiation of space travel.
Now the second theme here is relativity.
The thing is that the faster an item goes, the more energy it required to move, and the faster it moves though space, the slower it moves through time. Time is a dimension and i suspect also a vector, so the faster its moving in one vector, the slower its moving in others (aka time), as time is another dimension in which an object travels, the faster it goes, the more energy it needs and tends to infinity the closer you get to the speed of light, but time goes to 1/infinity the closer you get to the speed of light.
where the offects are negligable at the speeds we can travel, satelites and space craft which reach a significant speed (a GPS satelite does 14000 KPH) will require correcting a few seconds per year due to time dialation.
You have a lot of comments here, but I’m not sure you have a satisfactory answer yet. It’s a tricky thing to summarise succinctly and in layman’s terms, but I’ll try my best…
Space and time are inextricably linked. It took the genius of Einstein just over 100 years ago to realise this. Part of that realisation was that both are malleable. The thing that IS fixed is the speed of light in a vacuum. Sounds crazy, but hear me out here…
A repercussion of our 4-dimensional spacetime is that *every single object in the universe* is ‘moving’ at the same ‘speed’ when you add the space and time components together. The faster an object moves, the slower time *must* pass.
Now, another realisation – and one that helped him move from Special Relativity in 1906 to General Relatively in 1916 – is that to an observer, acceleration and gravity are indistinguishable. If I put you inside a stationary lift on Earth, you would experience a 10m/s/s force pulling you down (we are so used to this we don’t notice it). If I teleported that lift into an area of space far away from any strong gravitational field and pulled you at 10m/s/s it would be impossible to differentiate.
For you and your watch, whatever acceleration/gravitational force is being applied, your *perception* of the passage of time would remain the same, BUT, because we can’t escape the fact that the spacial and temporal components must always equate to the same value, the faster through space you move (or in the case of your example, simply removing the gravitational acceleration of Earth), the slower time must move. Your watch will appear to tick once per second *to you*, but anyone capable of looking at your watch will witness it ticking at a different rate.
In this example, it’s us on Earth who are accelerating, and your watch which isn’t – its movement through space is zero, therefore it passes through time at the maximum rate. We on Earth are slowed slightly by being in a weak gravitational well, so will perceive your watch to be ticking slightly faster than our own.
Please do ask more questions if you have them – it is incredibly difficult to explain in a few paragraphs.
Is there any good theories as to why supermassive entities cause time dilation? Like what about being so big causing relativity? Also someone said speed and motion also cause relativity differences. Why would motion increase it? Is it because motion puts force on an object condensing it’s mass? But wouldn’t that require a gravitational pull to make the force from?
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