For the traveling twin only a few moments pass during the journey, but for the twin on Earth, it has been decades. This fact fuels an interesting thought experiment known as the Twin Paradox, where one twin goes on a light speed journey and the other stays on Earth. As objects approach the speed of light, their relative time slows down.
A closer look at the above math reveals it is calculating the effects of velocity on time. Waitaminute, slower? That doesn’t grok with gravity slowing down time. That means that time inside the ISS has so far been about one tenth of a second slower than the time down here on earth. Then I calculated the epsilon factor as epsilon = sqrt ( 1 – v^2 / c^2 ) = 0.9999999996443555 Finally I applied the epsilon factor to the ISS orbit time (3013 days * epsilon) and found out that the resulting difference is 0.0925 seconds. I considered the ISS speed v as 8000 m/s or 0.00002667c (c is the speed of light). Lucky me for living in the Information Age that a quick google search found someone had already done the math: So this begs the question, How much longer have astronauts on the International Space Station lived compared to us on the ground? Later, scientists would fly aircraft over the Chesapeake Bay carrying an atomic clock, to further prove the clock in the air ran faster than one on the ground. This natural phenomenon is known as Gravitational time dilation.Įxperimental proof for this phenomena came with the Pound-Rebka Experiment in 1959. The more gravity, the slower time progresses until time appears to a stop in a black hole from the perspective of an outside observer. One of those nifty facts Einstein discovered in his Theory of Relativity is that the force of gravity affects time.
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