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
This is a physics question, not biology.
When you move fast or you’re in a strong gravitational field, you experience time slower.
All observers need to measure the exact same value for the speed of light. We have proved this experimentally. Someone moving very fast (say half the speed of light) needs to measure the same speed of a photon as someone standing still. As a result, the person moving half the speed of light expresses time about 86% the speed than the person standing still. So if 100 seconds pass for the person standing still, 86 seconds pass for the person moving at half the speed of light. This has also been proven, and our satellites in orbit (flying around at several kilometers a second) have to account for this fact on their internal clocks. This is Special Relativity.
This works well and fine for things moving at constant speeds, but in reality, things are constantly accelerating, whether it’s in a gravitational field or otherwise. This also has an effect on time. You may have heard that mass bends spacetime, and that’s how gravity essentially works, but since it’s bending time as well, that means time works differently in the high gravity environment. This is General Relativity. This is what’s happening in interstellar, they approach the black hole, and are experiencing such a strong gravitational field that multiple years are passing on Earth while they only experience a few seconds.
As of now, we have no way to experience speed or acceleration that powerful to make a noticeable difference in the age of two people. Astronaut twins Scott and Mark Kelly have spent vastly different amounts of time in orbit. Scott Kelly famously spent a year in space so he could be compared to his brother Mark afterwards so we could see the long term effects of spacetravel on the human body. They weren’t looking for the effects of time dilation, but the difference in time passing for them would be a few microseconds shorter for Scott than it was for Mark.
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