What is Time Dilation ?

Time dilation moves at the speed of light and moving at the speed of light makes you travel faster into the future. But there’s a problem with this type of time travel is you would have to make a ship that goes fast enough.

In Interstellar, the major plot points surrounding time dilation are the difference between time passing in two different locations, where the astronauts sitting near the black hole felt time passing at a slower rate than their families back home on Earth.

Scientist hasn’t found a way to make a spaceship go as fast as the speed of light. One reason you can’t go the speed of light is if you make an object go at high speeds its mass increases, and it takes more energy to keep it moving that faster.

Similarly, when some of them head down to the water world, they feel time passing at a slower rate than the astronaut left on the spacecraft. Now, ignoring the exact numbers of this difference, which depends on things like how big the black hole is, how far you are from it, and how much movie magical math you’re willing to go for, this kind of time dilation does happen.

The principle is this: the deeper you find yourself in a strong gravitational field, the slower your clock will run, relative to someone who is not in as strong a gravitational field.

The formula for mass to increase is almost the same formula for time dilation.

the first three dimensions are used to specify an object’s location/movement in space (forward-backwards, left-right and up-down), while the fourth dimension locates its position in time. All four dimensions are used to specify completely the location or dynamism of an object in space. Collectively the four dimensions are inseparably interlinked and known as space-time.

Being three dimensional creatures (possessing length, width and height), humans are unable to see the fourth dimension as our physical world is constructed within these three physical dimensions. We might feel or intuit time’s presence we can never actually detect it with our three-dimensional senses because it extends beyond our universe

Humans only perceive the fourth dimension time as memories lodged at variable intervals, the result of which is our apparent perception of time moving forward in a straight line. However, time still exists as a dimension and objects can cross it in a similar way as they do the others, although three dimensional like humans can only move in one direction forward through time. If we could see an object’s fourth dimensional space-time (or world-line) it may resemble a spaghetti-like line stretching from the past to the future showing the spatial location of the object at every instant in time.

Space And Time are simultaneous phenomena (like mass and energy), and together form the fabric of the universe known as space-time. A demonstration of four dimensional space-time’s inseparability is the fact that, as astronomers often remind us, we cannot look into space without looking back into time. We see the Moon as it was 1.2 seconds ago and the Sun as it was 8 minutes ago.

in accordance with Einstein’s general theory of relativity, a massive object in space stretches the fabric of both the space and time around it. For example, our Sun’s mass bends its surrounding space so that the Earth moves in a straight line but also circles within the Sun’s curvature in space.

The Sun’s affect on time is to slow it down, so time runs slower for those objects close to the massive object. Interestingly, gravity is the result of mass stretching the fabric of the space-time around it. Gravity also has an infinite range such that no matter how far apart two masses are in space they will always experience some gravitational pull towards each other.

Theoretical physicists have tried to explain this phenomena in terms of gravitons, S-Theory, and M-Theory, but even today a successful quantum theory of gravity is yet to be found.

A property of light is that it always travels at the same constant speed in a vacuum of 186,000 miles a second (700 million mph) and you can’t go any faster. The reason for this is that mass increases with speed all the way to infinity and so an infinite amount of energy would then be needed to travel beyond the speed of light.

The mathematical equations states that Speed = Distance ÷ Time. However, the Speed of light (c) is fixed, and as you travel at relativistic speeds, or those speeds in which the relativistic effect becomes significant, then the Distance and Time values in the equation start to change. What actually happens is that Time and Distance are ‘relative’ to one another, and as you travel close to the speed of light, distances become shortened while time is lengthened. This is explained in Einstein’s theory of special relativity.

For a person traveling at 99% the speed of light, Time slows for them by a factor of 7. If they were to travel to a star 7 light years away, at 99% speed of light, it would take them 1 year, but to an observer on Earth it would have seemed like 7 years.

person attained 99.999% the speed of light, only 1 year would pass on-board for every 223 years back on Earth. Finally, You don’t need to travel at light speed for time dilation to occur but you won’t notice the effects until you go extremely fast.

in the theory of special relativity, the “slowing down” of a clock as determined by an observer who is in relative motion with respect to that clock. In special relativity, an observer in inertial (i.e., nonaccelerating) motion has a well-defined means of determining which events occur simultaneously with a given event.

A second inertial observer, who is in relative motion with respect to the first, however, will disagree with the first observer regarding which events are simultaneous with that given event

A notion of simultaneity is required in order to make a comparison of the rates of clocks carried by the two observers. If the first observer’s notion of simultaneity is used, it is found that the second observer’s clock runs slower than the first observer’s by a factor of Square root of√(1 − v2/c2), where v is the relative velocity of the observers and c equals 299,792 km (186,282 miles) per second—i.e., the speed of light.

Similarly, using the second observer’s notion of simultaneity, it is found that the first observer’s clock runs slower by the same factor. Thus, each inertial observer determines that all clocks in motion relative to that observer run slower than that observer’s own clock.

A closely related phenomenon predicted by special relativity is the so-called twin paradox. Suppose one of two twins carrying a clock departs on a rocket ship from the other twin, an inertial observer, at a certain time, and they rejoin at a later time

In accordance with the time-dilation effect, the elapsed time on the clock of the twin on the rocket ship will be smaller than that of the inertial observer twin—i.e., the non-inertial twin will have aged less than the inertial observer twin when they rejoin.

The time-dilation effect predicted by special relativity has been accurately confirmed by observations of the increased lifetime of unstable elementary particles traveling at nearly the speed of light.

The clock paradox effect also has been substantiated by experiments comparing the elapsed time of an atomic clock on Earth with that of an atomic clock flown in an airplane.