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Word Gems
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Einstein
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time is affected by motion
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even when you walk across the room, your wristwatch runs more slowly
Motion, as does mass, affects the flow of time.
Something that’s moving will know a flow of time that is slower than that of a stationary object. Even when you cross the room, the clock on your wrist, or on your iPhone, will knock off increments of time more slowly than the unmoving clock on the kitchen wall.
But wait. Strictly speaking, it's not that your wristwatch slows down - your watch is working fine, but time itself has slowed down; that is, it's slowed down, for you, relative to time in another frame of reference. For example, if you walk to the kitchen, with your friend remaining on the couch, unmoving, in the living room, your friend would (if she could) perceive your time -- concerning you, one who is moving -- as unfolding more slowly than time in her frame of reference.
For you, walking to the kitchen, time seems "normal," and you will not detect any slowness in time at all; your wristwatch is doing fine. The disparity would come to light only when you return to the living room, sit down on the couch again, and compare your atomic clock to hers, revealing that yours is now running a few trillionths of a second more slowly relative to your friend's watch.
Editor’s note: This notion of “moving” and “stationary” is highly subjective. The person on the way to the fridge might be moving relative to the stationary clock on the kitchen wall, but the clock on the kitchen wall, as part of the Earth, is moving relative to the Moon, or the Sun, or many other items. In fact, there might be an infinite number of “temporal frames of reference” if we had eyes to perceive.
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Factors affecting the flow of time:
Gravity or mass of an object slows the rate of time.
Altitude, distance from a massive object, speeds up the flow of time. In the movie "Interstellar," because the travelers were close to a black hole, an hour there was equal to seven years on Earth.
Motion, the faster you move through space, the slower you move through time.
Editor’s note: When I first started looking at this subject, I found it difficult to remember which factor increased or decreased the rate of time. But then I began to understand the process more, and now it’s not so confusing. Here’s how to look at it: Motion slows time because, think of the extreme case, if you were a photon traveling at the speed of light, there would be zero time for you, and so, we can think of any motion as just a step toward light-speed. Gravity, with its heavy hand, warps not only space but time, as well; as a result, time slows down. And altitude is just a variation on gravity; in that, the farther you are from a massive body, the less gravitational impact it will have on you, and therefore, altitude, or distance from a massive body, speeds up time.
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