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?
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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.
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.
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.
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.
Here is an interesting way to think about it:
Relativity doesn’t imply that you can age faster or slower. It states the opposite. It states that you age at one second per second, no matter what.
From your frame of reference, time for someone else may appear to pass faster or slower. In their frame of reference, time passes at exactly one second per second.
There are no biological implications from the theory of relativity unless your head is moving away from your feet at relativistic speeds. In that case you’d have bigger worries.
According to relativity, you can time travel into the future. Everything everywhere is traveling to the future, but at different speeds.
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The thing is, the faster you go (spatially) the slower you go (temporally). Meaning, everyone that is slower than you are going to the future faster than you are, their clock is ticking faster. And thus they age faster.
What do you feel when you’re much, much, much faster than everyone else? Nothing. You feel completely normal. But you’ll notice that everything else around you is going fast forward.
Time dilation doesn’t affect aging at all. In fact it doesn’t affect time from the perspective of the person in question at all ever. Time dilation changes how you perceive someone else’s “time”. So you may live 40 years and see someone come back from a space journey and they only aged 10 years, but to the person on the space journey they only spent 10 years while you spent 40. To them you aged rapidly , but. You didn’t actually. You lived 40 years and aged appropriately. And to you , you saw them age very slowly, but they didn’t actually. To them they lived 10 more years and aged appropriately.
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