You’ve probably thought about the concept of time before, how it works, what it is, and how it is always constant. Time is very complex, and hard to grasp your mind around, but think of time as we know slowing down or even stopping. This is what happens in space. Time, as you drift further away from earth, essentially stops.
In our world there are not very many perfect constant variables, but one thing we can always rely on is time. Time is thought of as a direction seeing that just as we move around physically, we can move around in time. The difference between time and physical movement is that you can take a few steps in one direction and then go back to where you started, with time we are constantly moving forward but we have no possible way to go back. This is called the arrow of time which makes sense because once you shoot an arrow forward there is no returning to the original point from which it came, it can only go further.
Even though we can’t physically travel back in time, it is still a pretty confusing concept. We look at space as a distance. If time is a direction we are able to measure distance in time, but instead we measure time with clocks. We are very fortunate that we have figured out a way of measuring time, but the secret to this measurement is light.
Light is a strange thing seeing as it is very shy. If you’re following a beam of light and you try to go faster to catch it, the light will speed up at the exact same time at the exact same speed. No matter how hard you try to catch it, it will always stay ahead of you, which means that light will always travel at the same speed that you are traveling at. This is why we say that the speed of light is a constant variable, it is always ahead of you at the same speed. Because light is always traveling at this same speed, you will always know its speed which is three trillion meters per second, so you can use this speed to figure out how to measure time.
Think of time actually, in our eyes, slowing down essentially to a stop. This process is called spacetime. Spacetime is any model such as the earth that combines the variables space and time into a single continuum. Many experiments have been conducted on this theory, and proven true. Astronauts have taken atomic clocks onto a space shuttle and the clocks have actually slowed down because they were bound to the earths inertial clocks.
If you were sent into space without having any restrictions, such as suffocating or dying at all, the people watching you would notice that you would start slowing down until you came to a complete stop. In your eyes you would see the earth rapidly spinning, this is called time dilation. The reason this happens is because time on earth is constant, in space time is a variable. Time in space stays the same for you, but those observing you drifting off into space would notice that you would begin to slow down the further you got away from earth.
Time is a constant on earth but it is a variable in space. Time is very complex, and hard to grasp your mind around. Scientists are doing more studies to try to get a better understanding of the concept of time and space, and with a lot of research we are starting to grasp an idea of how it works.
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