There are all sorts of quotes about time. One of my favorite quotes is by Abhijit Naskar, the author of "Love, God & Neurons: Memoir of a scientist who found himself by getting lost." He said, “Time is basically an illusion created by the mind to aid in our sense of temporal presence in the vast ocean of space. Without the neurons to create a virtual perception of the past and the future based on all our experiences, there is no actual existence of the past and the future. All that there is, in the present.”
An astronaut venturing into a black hole.
Source: NASA [astronaut]; NASA/ESA and G. Bacon, STScI [black hole illustration]
One of the most
influential physicists to have ever lived, Albert Einstein, shared this view,
writing, "People like us who believe in physics know that the distinction
between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent
illusion." In other words, time is an illusion.
When you think
about it, it makes sense that time is an arbitrary construct — it's our way of
making sense of growing up and growing old while the world changes around us.
It's not all that hokey. So let's look at how our perception of time changes in
different locations.
It's All Relative:
According to
Einstein's own theories, time
moves differently for someone below sea level than for someone
situated on the highest peaks on the planet (according to some studies,
"at sea level you age one-billionth of a second less every year than you
would if you lived on top of Mt. Everest."). This is due to a phenomenon
posited by general relativity called gravitational time dilation.
Artist rendering of a star undergoing spaghettification as it’s devoured by a supermassive black hole during a so-called ‘tidal disruption event.'
Source: ESO/M. Kornmesser
The logic behind
gravitational time dilation is fairly simple: Objects with a lot of mass
create a strong gravitational field. This gravitational field noticeably
warps the fabric of spacetime around these objects, producing what we know as
gravity. When a stream of light particles passes by an object with sufficient
gravity, the stream of photons traveling at the speed of light would appear to
bend.
What's even more
interesting is that mass can warp the very fabric of time itself, causing it to
move slower or faster depending on how massive the object is, and how strong
the object's gravitational pull is, which is where time dilation really becomes
wonky to us.
It should be
noted, however, that an observer in the strong gravity experiences time as
running normally. It is only in relation to a reference frame with
weaker gravity that time runs slowly. To a person in strong gravity, time
appears to pass normally, while a clock in weak gravity runs fast. While to the
person in weak gravity, the clock appears to run normally and the clock in
strong gravity runs slowly. Of course, there is nothing wrong with the clocks.
Time itself is slowing down and speeding up because of the relativistic way in
which mass warps space and time.
The faster one
moves, the slower time passes in relation to a static observer's perception.
Matter traveling at the speed of light does not really experience time or
distance, at least relative to a static point. Just watching a spaceship drift
off into deep space, the people on Earth view the ship as moving much more
slowly through space and time than the people on the ship perceive it to be
moving. Crew members would also age at a slower rate, the faster they move.
Making Time Dilation Easy:
Take another cool
example: The movie "Interstellar" in which time dilation is
demonstrated (spoilers beyond, obviously). In the movie, a crew leaves Earth in
search of a habitable planet we could flee a dying Earth for. At one point in
the film, a few crew members land on a water world located not too far from a
gargantuan black hole/wormhole. Given the proximity to the super-dense stellar
object, the planet experiences unimaginably volatile waves, and the time
dilation becomes extreme. One hour on the surface was equal to 7 years for
someone beyond the black hole's orbit.
Astronauts on the
ISS experience a much less dramatic form of time dilation, given the
International Space Station is not traveling anywhere near relativistic speeds.
Two twin astronauts were part of an experiment conducted by NASA; they
calculated that the twin who spent the most time in space actually aged 5
milliseconds more than his Earth-bound twin.
It Gets Even Weirder:
Perhaps the
strangest example of time dilation can be seen in and around black holes. Time
ticks much differently the closer you get to the event horizon of a black hole.
Imagine that you had two clocks — one held by an observer beyond the immensely
strong gravity of the object, and another held by an observer passing near the
event horizon — the clock farther away would tick faster than the one close to
the event horizon.
From the point of
view of the observer near the event horizon, one day may have passed, while the
person observing from the outside may have experienced a decade of time.
Eventually, time may appear to stop altogether for the observer near the event
horizon. From the outside, the observer at the event horizon would begin to
redshift, which means the wavelength of light they emit would move toward the
red portion of the electromagnetic spectrum until the light becomes dimmer and
dimmer. Inevitably, time would appear to stop altogether before the observer
plunges into the event horizon. In theory, we would never actually see this
occur, as the object would appear to freeze and never actually disappear from
sight into the black hole.
Black holes can be
formed when a massive star reaches the end of its life, its core begins to
collapse in on itself, spitting out large quantities of gas and dust in a
supernova event. The star must be at least three times as massive as our Sun in
order for this process to occur. It is thought that supermassive black
holes, which range from 100,000 to tens of billions of
times the mass of the Sun, may be formed by a sort of chain reaction, and
this is where extreme time dilation comes in.
Devoured by a Big Ole Black Hole:
If you're
wondering what actually happens when something finally gets sucked into the
event horizon — the point at which nothing, not even photons (or light itself)
can travel faster than the object's escape velocity, thus there's no chance of
escaping its grasp — the physics gets rather convoluted and our understanding
of how things work begins to fall apart.
It's believed that
an observer inside a black hole would eventually stop experiencing time
altogether, but they would become stretched out as the black hole slowly ripped
them apart — atom by atom. This is called spaghettification, The forces of
gravity during a so-called "tidal
disruption event" would pull harder on your head vs. your feet, and
you'd be shredded.
Thankfully, we can
sometimes measure these events, at least when they happen to other stellar
objects. This is because they produce a lot of energy we can detect using
specialized telescopes, like the ESO. Often gas and dust obscure our view, but
if we catch an event at the right time, we can study just what happens when the matter is devoured by a supermassive black hole.
As For Einstein...
As we saw from
Einstein's quote, he believed that time is an illusion, that both the
future and the past are unchangeable, and will play out exactly the way they
were meant to.
Many physicists
share this view, but there are some that have alternate explanations for the
way things will play out in the long run. One suggests that the present,
future, and past are still mostly unwritten. Or, they are all playing out at
the exact same time. The Block
Universe Theory contributes a lot to these ideals.
Overall, do you
think Einstein was right or wrong?
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