Feature: 3 Mind-Blowing Facts About Time

The universe is an infinite expanse of space that progresses through what we call time, an ever-changing factor marching us all along in the same direction. For watchmaking, time is a matter of hours, minutes and seconds—but for a physicist, it’s a window into the downright bizarre. We’ve recruited our researcher once more to find out three incredible things about time that will quite simply blow your mind.

Your Head Is Older Than Your Feet

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We’re all under the impression that time is a constant, that it runs the same no matter what. Sometimes it can feel slow, when you’re bored waiting for your internet connection to get fixed, or quickly when you’re trying to squeeze in another episode of Better Call Saul before going to bed, but this, we all know, is based only on perception, and that time is in fact fixed.

Well, our researcher has discovered that this widely held understanding is wrong, that time is not only not fixed, but that it can run slower or faster depending on your height. That means that if two twins are born one tall and one short, the taller one is actually older and will continue to get increasingly older as more time passes. That is, unless the shorter one moves into the apartment upstairs.

Not only that, but if time goes faster the higher up you are, that means your own head is older than your feet. Unless you spent most of your life in a reclined position, your noggin will be celebrating your birthday before your feet will.

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How on Earth is this even possible? Or rather, how far away from Earth is this even possible? There is a time differential in height because of our proximity to our planet, or indeed any massive object—that is to say any object with mass. You don’t need to be an astrophysicist to know that Earth is decently heavy, so much so that it has a direct effect on time itself.

If there’s a universal principle we can all get behind, it’s that the speed of light, about 180,000 miles per second, is a strict constant. It does not change, ever. But when two clocks are zeroed next to each other, and one is moved higher than the other, only to then run faster by a few billionths of a second, it begs the question: isn’t light moving faster as well? If time speeds up the further away from Earth something is, and the time light takes to travel a fixed distance increases too, then that can only mean one thing—that light is going faster than … the speed of light.

But our researcher has uncovered that this is not true after all. They tell us that it’s Earth’s gravity that bends the time and space through which light travels, so the closer light is to Earth’s rocky mass, the more it bows, extending the distance it has to travel. This means it takes longer to get from one point to the other than it does when it’s further away, slowing time down, keeping your feet younger than your head.

Time Goes Slower When You’re Moving

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Your granny would most likely tell you that people who are “always on the run” are going to get “old before their time” along with lots of other nuggets of wisdom like that, but our researcher has come to the conclusion that your granny is, indeed, wrong.

What granny failed to understand is that, actually, the faster you travel, the slower time gets. If you took two very accurate clocks, zeroed them, left one stationary and whizzed the other one around the planet in an aeroplane, the clock on the aircraft would come back having recorded less time than the one that remained behind.

That’s not a thought experiment; it’s been tested, and those were the results. This means that if you were to get a round-the-world flight, when you landed back home you’d be younger than you would have been if you’d just stayed home, by a very, very small fraction of a second. But that doesn’t just mean that you’d be younger than you would have been—it also means that you’ve time-travelled.

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Once again, our researcher tells us that it’s light speed shenanigans at play here. Light can only travel at one speed—light speed, 180,000 miles per second if you remember—no more, no less. But how about this: if you’re on that plane, looking to shave some sweet hundredths off your age, and you shine a torch towards the cockpit, you’ll see that light travel away from you at the speed of light. Not so crazy.

What’s crazy is that if someone’s on the ground watching the plane go by, and sees you shining that torch, they won’t see the beam of light travelling at the speed of light plus the speed of the plane as you would expect—the light will still be travelling at, well, the speed of light. So, what gives? If the distance travelled by the light is the same for both you and this other observer, and the speed of light is the same, what’s going on? Time slows down. It’ll seem like nothing’s different for you on board, but for that observer, you’ll appear to be moving at a slower rate than you are.

But our researcher tells us that things get even weirder still. Not only will time appear to slow down to the observer, but the plane will look shorter as well. Thankfully, when the plane slows down, everything will become unsquished and you’ll get to enjoy that little bit of extra time you’ve managed to free up without consequence.

Time Can Stop Completely

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So, if time can be sped up and time can be slowed … can it be stopped? Our researcher worked long and hard on this one, and after many weeks of study, they returned to us with the answer of yes … and no. Well, what they said exactly was, “It’s complicated.”

Here’s the thing. You can’t just stop time; you need a few ingredients first. One, you’ll need a spaceship that can travel long distances very quickly—two of them, actually—two, you’ll need a companion with a clock and three, you’ll need a black hole, and a pretty big one at that.

It all boils down to the same principles we discussed previously, that time, space and gravity are intrinsically linked, and that gravity can bend spacetime. And what does a black hole have a lot of? Gravity. In fact, the infinitely small point in the middle, the singularity, has an infinite amount of gravity. Its gravity is so strong that not only does it bend light, it also stops it escaping completely.

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Our researcher has discovered that if light—or anything for that matter—gets too close to a black hole, it’s impossible for it to come back out again. That’s why it’s called a black hole! And there’s a point of proximity at which the gravity becomes so strong that no amount of energy will pull a visitor back out again, and that’s called the event horizon.

It’s the event horizon that can make time stop. This is where you’ll send your companion in the second spaceship to their doom—for science, of course—towards the black hole. How will you know when time has stopped? They’ll take that clock with them. So we can read the clock from our safe distance, the clock will beam a pulse of light towards us every second.

As our ill-fated companion heads towards the black hole, we’ll see the clock ticking, a beam of light flashing once per second. But as the influence of the black hole’s gravity starts to take effect, warping spacetime, the light will have further to travel, like the difference earlier between our head and our feet—but an immense amount more.

The closer they get, the more spacetime is bent, the further light has to travel and the longer apart each flash becomes—and the slower time appears to you as you watch. As the spaceship gets closer and closer to the event horizon, the further and further apart the flashes become, the slower it gets until eventually the ship is just about to cross—and it freezes. The spaceship will continue to cross the event horizon and become spaghettified as it’s drawn into the singularity, but for you, you’ll see the last two flashes spaced infinitely apart, therefore freezing the clock—and the spaceship—forever.

And that’s that. There’s more to time, as our researcher has demonstrated, than hours, minutes and seconds. It can be bent, quite literally, and even broken. It can be warped by the very planet we’re standing on and stopped by some of the most powerful entities in the universe. And I’ve got a feeling that our researcher is only just scratching the surface.

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