OK so I know this has been asked but I still don’t get it.
Who do humans age faster/slower? (Shown in interstellar for example) Biologically I don’t understand why the body would age faster?
In: 36
I wouldn’t think of it as aging faster or slower. Instead, think of it as experiencing or measuring time differently. Clocks measure/experience time by ticking. Bodies experience time by aging. Molecules experience time by decaying.
And know that, in order to experience time differently such that two people noticeably age differently requires acceleration to speeds approaching the speed of light.
It seems intuitive that time is the same for everyone. 30 mins lunch break is the same in New York as it is in Tokyo or Paris.
Which is true, because we’ve never experienced the conditions where it isn’t true. An experiment carried out over 100 years ago proved that light always travels at the same speed for everyone everywhere.
So you’re at home looking out of the window. The sunlight hits your face at 30 million m/s.
Then you see a superspeed rocket fly by at 10 million m/s, towards the Sun. Obviously if the Sun is reaching you at 30 and he’s heading towards it at 10, then the collision speed must be 40 million m/s. But no; everyone see light at 30 million m/s.
Einstein figured this out because time in the rocket, as you see it, is running slower than yours, so the passengers are aging less.
No one is aging faster or slower FROM THEIR PERSPECTIVE.
Time dilation is what you get when you observe others – not yourself. For you time always passes the same. 1 second feels like 1 second. Your body ages at that rate.
You are approaching it wrong.
So, when the crew drops down on the water planet time is moving at a slower rate for them. The crewman that remained behind on the ship experienced the regular flow of time.
Nothing was “biologically different.” They aged at the same rate, but due to the time dilation on the water planet they had only experienced a few hours while the crew on the ship experienced decades of time.
The faster you move, the slower time moves for you compared to someone who isn’t moving. This is a fundamental property of the universe; it “balances the equation” of special relativity.
So if you move very, very, very fast, like significant fractions of the speed of light, you will age more slowly than someone who is standing still compared to you. There isn’t anything different happening to you biologically, your aging process hasn’t changed, it’s just that you’re experiencing time at a different rate.