Monday, December 22, 2008

An idea of relative time

If you are in close orbit around a black hole, travelling very fast, and have your buddy on the phone (ok, let's pretend this is working - it's the principle I'm after), your voice will in his hear be veeery slooowww... pitched down. His voice, on the other hand will in your ear be something like an old record being played too fast - high pitched and fast. This is according to Einsteins theories. And I think proved by experiments under less dramatic circumstances.
The same would be true if you are cruizing the univers in a high velocity, maybe some percents from the speed of light. Or if you were standing on a really massive object talking to someone in an low gravity environment not moving very fast according to you.

Why is this?

I'm nor a mathemetican or a physicist. They could probably explain it very scientific.
But I have an alternative suggestion (well, I really don't know if it's an alternative, the same, something compleatly crazy or just stupid).

Let's take a look at our computers. In a computer there is a thing called clock frequence. It's like a clock, ticking really fast, that tells the computer to do a calculation. A personal computer of today makes about 2 billions of calculations per second.
If you are running to many applications or some application is demanding a lot of processing power you may have experience some lagging, ie. processes are running slow. This is because all calculations can't be achieved at the time needed.

So let's pretend our universe has a clock frequency (probably having something to do with the speed of light) and that everything happening in it, happens according to this frequency. On each tick of this clock all particles in our universe jumps one frame in time: An electron jumps, another particle splits into two, and so on.
Seen to the whole universe this is quite a lot of calculations!
There are places in the universe where not so many calculations are needed. Like some really dead part f space far, far away from everything. And there are relative small areas of space where a lot is to be calculated. Places where a lot of mass is present. Like in the vicinity of a black hole. And sometimes mass travels very far and have to interact with a lot of mass over time. The faster it's traveling the more mass it have to interact with.
Now we are back at the beginning of this post. Time runs slower for the fast travelling and the one near high gravity sources relatively to the observer (not affected by high gravity or fast travelling).

Could it be that the universe can't cope? That it needs to slow time down to manage. That the univers lags?

Think of the enormous amounts of calculations that is needed (fast) to describe what's happening if you were speeding your spaceship through space in near light speed.

What do you think, or know?
Please let me know.

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