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Speed of time

Thought of this thread after watching something about time travel and Stephen Hawking on Discovery Channel.

It was mentioned that the speed at which time travels is affected by gravity. As a result, time progresses slightly faster for orbiting satellites, and time progresses more slowly near black holes.

I didn't finish the show, so I still have questions.
First of all, what is the speed of time on Earth?

And I'm wondering if /sci/ would be a better place to ask this...

December 8, 2010

6 Comments • Newest first

Iceheart1111

I saw the black hole part, suggesting it's possible to travel into the future but not back

Reply December 8, 2010
radkai

Does it mean if you are traveling near speed of light, by the time you lift a finger many things happened on Earth?

Reply December 8, 2010
KnifeLegend

[quote=zezaru]Yup, later on in the video you see that it is physically impossible to go faster than the speed of light as time is slowed down for the object, but this time is a dramatic change. I believe time either became 4x or 10x slower.[/quote]

I believe the scale was about 2 weeks = 100 years when going at around 99.9% the speed of light.

Reply December 8, 2010
KnifeLegend

Time progresses slightly slower on Earth than in open space, but only by a few quintillionths of a second.

Reply December 8, 2010
MesoLover

It's the speed in which something is going at (I heard), going faster, slows down time for you, not noticeably of course. The nearer light speed you go the slower time goes and if a black hole absorbs light then it only makes sense that time go really slow there, that must have some pretty fast speed on that to slow down time. So yes a satellite would have faster time than the Earth because the Earth would spin much faster than a satellite, and a black hole has crazy gravity acting on that.. But for us 1second is 1 second.

Reply December 8, 2010
bluqaur

I think google would be a good place to ask honestly

Reply December 8, 2010