I’ve been thinking about relativity where the passage of time depends on your velocity, but I don’t really understand what this means physically. I understand that the clocks of two different people traveling at different relative speeds will be different, but what does this really mean? Does this imply that time is a physical quantity, like energy, and that depending on your speed you have less of it? To make this more complicated, my understanding is that it’s not just clocks that will be different, it’s the actual “age” of physical things; ex: if I’m traveling at the speed of light I can go infinite distance and to me it would be like waking from a coma, I would have no memory of traveling at all, so as far as I was concerned it didn’t happen. I guess I just don’t really understand what this means about the physical nature of time; is it a tangible quantity like matter or is it more like a byproduct of something else and what we call “the passage of time” is just how we measure it (ex: if I heat up a gas and the atoms get more disordered then it’s entropy has increased, but I can measure temperature and use that as a proxy for entropy).
In: 11
Alright, imagine you have a big, stretchy blanket. This blanket represents space-time, which is like a mix of space and time. When you put heavy things on the blanket, like planets or stars, it makes the blanket curve, just like when you put a heavy ball on your bed, it makes a dent.
Now, time is like the way we count how things change and move. It’s kind of like counting how many times you jump on a trampoline. But here’s the cool part: because the blanket is curved by those heavy things, time doesn’t tick the same way everywhere. It can tick slower or faster depending on how strong the curve is.
We can prove space-time exists with something called the theory of relativity, which is like a special way of thinking about how things move when they’re really fast or near something really heavy. Scientists have done lots of tests and experiments that show this theory is true.
In the universe, time helps us understand when things happen and in what order. Just like you grow older each year, everything in the universe goes through changes over time. We’re still figuring out exactly what causes time to work, but we know that it’s connected to space and how things move around. So, in a way, space, time, and everything in the universe are all tangled together like the threads in a big cosmic blanket!
(More advanced definition: Spacetime is one thing, not two. The universe has different properties, but just like you can’t separate the wetness and coldness from water to analyze them isolated, spacetime is kinda just its own thing with two properties)
Latest Answers