News from the world of maths: Einstein right on time
A central prediction of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity is that gravity makes clocks tick more slowly — time passes slower when you're close to a massive body like the Earth, compared to when you're further away from it where its gravitational pull is weaker. This prediction has already been confirmed in experiments using airplanes and rockets, but a new experiment in an atom interferometer measures the slowdown 10,000 times more accurately than before — and finds it to be exactly what Einstein predicted.
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posted by Plus @ 12:27 PM 
3 Comments:
- At 12:05 PM,
said... -
So what is the maximum and minimum speed of time in our universe?
- At 3:06 PM,
Plus said... -
The longest interval of time for some process (eg a heart beat or a human lifetime) is that measured by a clock moving with the observer. It is
called proper time. The length of that interval measured by some other clock in relative motion to that observer is always less than the proper time and as the relative speed approaches that of light, it tends to zero.
The twin paradox (see http://plus.maths.org/issue36/features/aiden) is related. If a twin stays at home and lives for 10 years on his watch while his identical twin goes off on a spacetrip at near light speed, then the travelling twin will return to find that he is
younger than his stay-at-home twin when he is reunited with him on earth.
So the maximal time is given by the proper time measured by a clock moving with you, and the minimum time can be arbitrarily small as the relative speed approaches that of light, or the gravitational field approaches the value needed to
make a black hole. - At 8:31 PM, mdharley said...
-
There is no such thing as the General Theory Of Relativity. Einstein was successful in developing the Special Theory Of Relativity which seems to describe much of what we know about our own universe in accord with conditions that he defined in the theory. He was unsuccessful in deriving the General Theory Of Relativity which, if ever derived, would apply under any set Of conditions. The Special Theory Of Relativity is to the Generla Theory Of Relativity as a Square is to a Polygon.
mdharley@hotmail.com