Time

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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