People in Darjeeling celebrate New Year 8 seconds earlier than people in Mumbai | Gravitational Time Dilation


 


By Sai Prasanna Thapa

Chemistry Department


‘Time is precious’, ‘Time should not be wasted’ is how I began the essay on Time as a kid. Over the years, I was fascinated by numerous theories that plugged the gaps between me and the truth. Time is one of them. I wondered as a seventh-grade student, if I set my watch five minutes earlier than the school clock, I’d be five minutes faster than my peers. Figuratively yes, theoretically no. And one Winter afternoon of 2018, as I was listening to a podcast on space-time, it changed my life forever.

Gravitational Time Dilation is an effect stated by Albert Einstein. In simple words, it is a difference between the passed time of an event observed by two people situated in different areas of gravitational potential. For the person closer to the gravitational mass, time will run slower for him than the one who is away, experiencing the weaker pull of gravity. It must be noted that the time difference is very less.

The Hafele–Keating experiment, a test of the Theory of Relativity by Einstein confirmed the Gravitational Time Dilation. In the month of October in 1971, Joseph C. Hafele, a physicist, and Richard E. Keating, an astronomer, took four cesium-beam atomic clocks aboard airplanes. They flew around the world, first eastward then westward, and compared the clocks against other from the USNO (United States Naval Observatory, “One of the oldest scientific agencies in the United States, with a primary mission to produce positioning, navigation and timing for the United States Navy and the United States Department of Defense”) and found out that the clocks ran differently.

Time dilation occurring in height differences of one meter was performed in the laboratory and then verified. Later, several other experiments were conducted which were conceded by the scientists.

Gravity does slow time and time continues to intrigue us. And next time you are walking in the Chowrasta (Darjeeling), remember that you can win the race against time. The odds are in your favour *winks.

 

“What I love about science is that as you learn, you don't really get answers. You just get better questions.”

-Turtles All the Way Down

 John Green

Comments

  1. Anmol SubbaOctober 16, 2021 at 7:45 PM

    If u r walking in chowrasta, remember u can win the race against time by 8 secs. *winks back

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

DARK MATTER by Anmol Subba

Image
DARK MATTER FOR PEOPLE IN HURRY                                               by Anmol Subba(Dept. of Physics) Those who are students of science or those who watch documentaries on cosmos have surely heard about DARK MATTER. But how many of you exactly know what dark matter really is? WHAT IS DARK MATTER?      But first I want to ask you a question:                           What is in our universe? Those who study science may say matter or energy. But they are just partially right, as in our universe, we find that the matter and energy that we can observe composite of only 5% of what actually is in our universe. This simply means that you, your family, Earth , Solar system, billions of galaxies make only just a tiny bit of the actual universe. So naturally now u may question: What about the remaining 95%? or more curiously why do scientist think observable matter and energy composite of only 5%?      Here are few reasons: 1.GALAXY CLUSTERS      Throughout space, astrophysical objects
Read more

The Chemistry Behind Luminescence: Photochemistry

Image
  By Sai Prasanna Thapa Chemistry Department As a child, I always wondered what made fireflies glow by night, and the seashores of Puerto Rico engulfed in radiant blue tides. Nature seems to have its magic to make things glow, but there is also Science behind it. Photochemistry is a branch of Physical Chemistry that deals with the emission or absorption of radiation. It includes mainly two types of processes—namely, Photophysical processes and Photochemical reactions. Photophysical processes take place in the presence of light without involving any chemical reactions. They occur due to the absorption of light by various substances, followed by the emission of the absorbed light. Photochemical reactions occur by absorption of radiations of an appropriate wavelength. There are chiefly three phenomena that cause Nature to glow: Chemiluminescence, Fluorescence and Phosphorescence. These three together are called Luminescence. As aforementioned, light is absorbed when a photoche
Read more

Oumuamua

Image
     By Esha Chettri Physics Department    On 19 th   October 2017, the first interstellar object visited our solar system. It was later named “ ‘Oumuamua ” and was discovered by Robert Weryk. The fellow astronomer at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, spotted the intriguing object with the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan- STARRS1) in Hawaii.    ‘Oumuamua is a Hawaiian word that translated to “scout” is a well-suited name, the strange object is an emissary, a representative of some distant star system we do not know anything about. Prior to entering our solar system, it had been wandering the cold, empty depths of interstellar of the Milky Way for hundreds of millions, or perhaps billions of years, before encountering the sun.    ‘Oumuamua was originally classified as a comet but the observations later revealed no sign of cometary activity after it passed through the Sun on 9 th September 2017 at an incredible speed of 87.3 kilometres per second. It appear
Read more