Time is something
everyone is aware of. 60 seconds make a minute, 60 minutes carve an hour, 24
hours generate a day and so on. This physical version of time is something
physicists call linear time. Everyone agrees upon linear time. But consider
this, someone comes up to you and asks you to draw time, what would you draw?
You might draw a wall clock that ticks at a uniform frequency viz° every
second, or you might draw a calendar which has margins on each day which shows
physical passing of time. Surprisingly these answers raise more questions than
they actually answer.
So, what is time?
Aristotle once said ”time is the most unknown of all unknown things.” Although,
2500 years ago it still stands true today. Now, if you google the same, it
would probably tell you that it is a dimension, which is right from an aspect
but if looked at from another viewpoint, time is a unit for measurement.
Time seems to
flow in only one direction, towards the future. It would be ridiculous if I
said that our past is not gone and that our future already exists, in fact according
to physicists, the odds of this to be true are pretty high. Recent studies have
shown that our perseverance of time is more or less just an illusion.
According to
Einstein’s relativity, time itself can speed up or slow down. It’s amazing that
something we are so familiar with, is so different from what we think it is.
Most of us would agree to the statement,” time passes the same for everyone.”
But through the Theory of relativity Einstein, proved this statement partially
wrong.
Assume an object
is in the state of rest, it doesn’t move through space, but the object still
moves in time and as long as it stays in rest, all its motion is through time.
Now if I were to push that object, some part of its motion through time gets
diverted towards motion through space and thus, time slows down for him.
This was
Einstein’s key insight that motion through space effects the passage of time.
Thanks for reading,
Rishit
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