“If you
could turn every one of the atoms in a paperclip into pure energy – and leaving
no mass whatsoever – the paper clip would yield the equivalent energy of 18
kilotons of TNT. That’s roughly the size of bomb that destroyed Hiroshima”,
explains PBS Nova.
Well, this
is one of the most famous and well known equations in history, E = mc2.
Now this equation has changed the point of view of many people and also
scientists about time. One of the many implications of his special relativity
work is that the time is relative. To explain it in an entertaining way he
said, “When you sit with a nice girl for two hours you think it’s only a
minute, but when you sit on a hot stove for a minute you think it’s two hours.
That’s relativity.”
This theory
explains that when an object is moving very fast it experiences more slowly
than when it is at rest. And mathematically it is
T = t/(1-v2/c2)1/2
Where, T =
time experienced by the moving object, t = time experienced by the static
object, v = velocity of the moving object, c = speed of light.
Source: Secrets of the Universe
Now from
the formula it is clear that as the velocity of the body increases T increases.
And if the velocity becomes the speed of the light itself, time becomes
infinite. And velocity cannot surpass the speed of light.
So this
effect can be thought of like his – a 30 – years old astronaut is moving in
space with a speed which is approaching speed of light, and spends 1 year
there. When he would get back on the Earth, he would see that 50 years have
passed in the meanwhile on the much slower moving planet Earth.
Notice
here, that the astronaut would not feel like time is moving slow or something –
rather he would spend just one year there on the space – but time would be
slower on the Earth for him only.
I know this
sound quite interesting. However we currently don’t have the technology to
travel anywhere near that speed.
Time is
affected by yet another factor – gravitational field. To say it in brief,
gravity slows the passage of time. To put it other words – time goes faster the
farther you get from the Earth’s surface as compared to that on the surface of
the Earth. Therefore you can say that the person on the 10th floor
of a building is younger than the person on the ground floor. And this is
obviously known as ‘gravitational time dilation’.
It has been
verified many times by experiments with the help of precise atomic clocks. Note
that, the person who is on the 10th floor (weaker gravity) would not
show his own clock running fast or slow. He would see his own clock normal
while the other’s clock running slow.
So that’s
all for today. Hope you got to learn something new.
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