Does this roughly mean, things are "sped up" in S62 from our point of view, if we could observe some activity on that star?
First, like others mentioned, they are way off in the effect size, for this kind of time dilation you need 80% the speed of light, not 8%.
Second, when looking at time dilation caused by velocity, it is always necessary to say who observes what since observers that move relative to each other won't agree on which clock runs at what speed. If the star moved at 80% of the speed of light, someone on that star would say "When a 100 minutes pass here, only 60 minutes pass on Earth" while an observer on Earth would say "When 100 minutes pass here, only 60 minutes pass on that star". So both observers would say that the other's clock is running slower than their own.
This answers a part of your last question - time dilation always makes clocks appear to tick slower than your clock if they move relative to you.
There are other effects that can make things appear "sped up", there's all kind of odd things happening when you go to high relativistic speeds ...
Interestlingly, the universe does have a preferred velocity (and thus a preferred inertial frame). It's the speed and direction that makes the cosmic background radiation not have a dipole.
https://astronomy.swin.edu.au/cosmos/c/Cosmic+Microwave+Back...
When they say "300,000 years after the big bang" how do they count that, is that seconds in some periodic movement inside matter or radiation?
Only after the universe became transparent did these photons become free, and since they were produced roughly homogenously in that soup there are everywhere in the same quanitity: a background radiation.
Since they were not produced in a localized event, they won't have a center. But since they're everywhere, they are a sort of absolute reference for how fast you're going (actually that's a new and interesting idea for me too, pretty neat).
What you’re asking is analogous to asking where the center of the Earth is on a map of the surface, and arguing it must exist because of how things on the horizon change when you move.
`Clocks slow down when they move in relation to you`
So to the "stationary" person, the clock of the person who zoomed off would be behind. But since it's relative, to the "zoomer" the stationary person went out and back. So then to the zoomer the stationary person's watch would be slower.
But which one is it? Do they end up showing the same time?
This is a famous paradox, see here for a full discussion/resolution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_paradox
It doesn't; phys.org is way off in their math (if they even bothered to check the math).
60 minutes, 11 seconds on earth would be more like it.
Simpler Sci without the Fi, but still incredible to lay people, is that earth’s gravity and the movement of the satellites cause time dilation that’s accounted for in GPS satellite clocks and the receiver clocks. It’s amazing how much the Special Relativity and General Relativity influence our daily lives.
See: The Wikipedia entry on GPS.
Time go faster at the top of a building compared to the bottom.
https://wtamu.edu/~cbaird/sq/2013/06/24/does-time-go-faster-...
I mean aside from the obvious one of it being an underlying theory for how the universe works and without it a lot of stuff would break it is really not that huge a part of most people’s lives. Sure, the GPS example is a fun one to bring up, but other than that there’s just a few things that we interact with that actually have a noticeable effect due to relativity, like some of the very characteristic properties of heavier metals or the design of particle accelerators, which many people used to have in their house until recently. And I guess you could go out and look at Einstein’s cross. But other than that it really doesn’t affect us that much.
tl;dr we perceive gps satellites clock ticks faster due to lower gravity (+46us/day), but slower due to motion (-7us/day).
The recognition that there are consequences to our understanding of time if the speed of light is constant in every reference frame was earth shattering in the science community a century ago.
Do we have to remember that the people we communicate with have different experiences of time?
Gender identity, sexual orientation, native language. Temporal perception?
Honestly it doesn’t seem hard to overcome. But I do love the idea of shipping off a problem and having it done 20% faster.
But wait, aren’t they 20% farther along in evolutionary terms too? So isn’t that like a multimillion year advantage?
This is already true on Earth. Different people process information at different speeds. Think about when you're talking to someone who is elderly. Do you slow down a bit so they have a chance to keep up?
I do think this thought experiment is a bit different though. In the sense that everyone orbiting S62 is faster than us, by a considerable margin. There will still be individual variances of course but the baseline moves. It’s not just a way you adapt to an individual but to an entire group of people, based on properties of their location.
I highly recommend it.
We can't, that's the whole point of relativity.
Communicating "instantly" would be a paradox.
Remember there is no absolute reference to which speeds are measured, aka. a "luminiferous aether". Its existence was disproved in the 19th century.
So Earthers are slow for observers on that star, but inhabitants of that star are also slow for Earthers; because speed is relative. Hence the name relativity.
And the reason it doesn't result in a paradox with light-speed communication is that the increasing (resp. decreasing) latency between the two account for the increasing (resp. decreasing) difference of time caused by this discrepancy of an object speeding up away from (resp. toward) the other.
There is an awesome article on wikipedia that describes it more. Totally blew my mind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_of_simultaneity
As an aside, I’ve found this to be a helpful way to visualise data flowing through distributed systems...
You spoiled the movie.
Damn you. Damn you all to hell!
But time here also appears to pass slower to them (an observer there)!
It will be hard to imagine if you try to retain the concept of some universal clock. The important thing is that if you actually traveled from one to the other that during your accelerations time would warp around you so as to perfectly make both sides local clocks correct.
This is the core concept of special relativity from which the rest is derived, neither of us is special in how our environment behaves. Whether you're on the spaceship traveling at 0.99c relative to earth or "at rest" (both are actually at rest but hopefully you know what I mean) everything feels the same as long as you are not accelerating.
And I also don't get your comment. Probably because I don't get relativity.
If we send a clock into space it will just tick away seconds (a unit designed by people). When it will return back to earth years later in my mind it just ticked away the same amount of time as it would have on earth.
What am I missing about relativity?
So when you travel away from the earth at the speed of light you can't see the rotarion of the earth. But when you move back to the earth you are still just as old as the people who were the same age as you when you left?
Imagine your clock is an LED, a light sensor, and a mirror. The “tick” of this clock is: the LED sends out a brief flash of light, which travels to the mirror, bounces off, and returns to the sensor.
If this clock is stationary relative to you, the time of that tick is the distance between the three components divided by the speed of light (c = d / t).
If it is moving relative to you, the light has to be at an angle, shining at where the mirror will be by the time the light gets there. This is a longer distance, and so it ticks more slowly from your perspective.
Every atom in your body, or in a clock, is held together by forces that behave like the light in the example clock.
Give two people clocks and have them move relative to each other, and both think the other is slow. This leads to the “twins paradox”, and while I can say the answer involves acceleration, I don’t fully intuit it and can’t help you with it.
Imagine the same volumetric difference exists in 3d space, but the different regions are not hotter/colder, but time goes faster/slower.
So You get two identical clocks, showing the same time, and move one of them into a “slow time” region (which would be a star moving very fast (8% of lightspeed). Let some time pass, then re-join the two clocks.
Since they spent some time in regions with different “speed of time” they’ll show a different time.
I might be wrong though, I’m not a professional.
The track is divided into lanes and each player is set backwards based on their lane by a fixed distance, despite the fact the finish line is in the same position. This is because of the curvature of the track - if everyone started at the same "line" across all lanes, the runners at the outer lanes would be running a further distance than those on the inner lanes!
Gravity does the same thing to time itself. The curvature is not of a track but of spacetime.
In Gravity, the main character starts at an inner lane and his daughter at an outer one - but the starting line is the same across all lanes. Gravity bends spacetime, such that the inner lane is shorter than the outer lane (in terms of distance in time). So when they ultimately arrive at the finish line, the daughter has traversed a longer path in the time dimension than her father.
The classic example is a clock of light ticking between two mirrors. If you are moving with that clock it is ticking at the speed of light. If I am in a frame of reference where the clock is moving perpendicular to the light tick's path, the light will have a greater distance to cover. [1] Since the speed is fixed to me, this tick is slower.
1. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8e/Ti...
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bg9MVRQYmBQ
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iJZ_QGMLD0
(Although the time dilation in Interstellar is due to gravity, not high-speed travel.)