Jakarta, CNNI Indonesia —
stay in Mountain or at the beach is the dream of many people; live in peace, away from the hustle and bustle of the city. When compared, which position yields more stay young?
A number of previous experts have voiced questions like this. One of them was solved by the creator of the theory of relativity, namely Albert Einstein.
Einstein’s theory of relativity turned human understanding of the universe upside down. A disturbing implication of general relativity is that time passes faster off Earth than on Earth.
This phenomenon occurs because the closer an object is to the Earth, the stronger its gravitational impact.
Since general relativity describes gravity as the deformation of space and time, time itself travels more slowly at higher altitudes and at greater distances from the Earth, where the gravitational influence is less.
So if time is related to gravity, does that mean people on top of mountains age faster than people at sea level?
Atomic clock proof
James Chin-wen Chou, a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder, Colorado, says time actually moves slower for all objects further away from the gravitational field like Earth.
This means that people living at high altitudes age faster than those at sea level.
“Gravity makes us age more slowly, relatively speaking,” says Chou.
“Compared to a person who is not near massive objects, we age slower by a very small amount. Indeed, for a person, the whole world around us develops more slowly under the influence of gravity,” he continued.
If you sat on top of Mount Everest, which is 8,848 meters above sea level for 30 years, you would be 0.91 milliseconds older than if you spent the same 30 years at sea level.
Similarly, if the twins living at sea level were to be separated by 30 years, with one moving to Boulder, Colorado at 1,600 meters, the twins living at high altitudes would be 0.17 milliseconds older than the twins living at sea level. their twins when they unite.
In one experiment, NIST researchers used one of the world’s most accurate atomic clocks to demonstrate that time runs faster even just 0.008 inches (0.2 millimeters) above the earth’s surface.
“These are not simple calculations,” said Tobias Bothwell, a NIST physicist and co-author of a 2022 paper published in the journal Nature.
“We saw changes in clock frequencies over a distance about the width of a human hair,” he said Live science.
The key to understanding why massive objects behave differently over time is to recognize that “spacetime” is like a four-dimensional tapestry woven from three space coordinates and one time coordinate.
“Anything that has mass affects space-time,” Andrew Norton, a professor of astrophysics at the Open University in England, told Live Science.
In the vicinity of objects with mass, “space-time is distorted, resulting in space warping and time dilation.”
“The effects are real and measurable but negligible in everyday situations,” says Norton.
However, when dealing with non-everyday situations, the phenomenon also known as gravitational time dilation can get tricky.
According to Norton, GPS satellites circling the world at an altitude of 20,186 kilometers must adjust to having their clocks run 45.7 microseconds faster than the clocks here, over a 24-hour period.
“The most pressing effect of relativity on time travel is probably the accuracy of GPS,” Chou said.
(can/arh)
