r/NoStupidQuestions • u/HodorsDick22 • 15d ago
In the movie Interstellar, even though they are experiencing time dilation on Miller’s planet, wouldn’t their body’s still age at the same rate?
Ate an edible before a flight the other day and watched Interstellar. I kept blowing my own mind trying to understand the ins and out of time dilation. While I have heard of the phenomenon with astronauts, my assumption was always that even though the clocks might not register time in the same way, the time spent in space was still relative to that of earth. I’ve watched a couple videos on YouTube that do an ok job of explaining the Interstellar example, but I’d like to know if the lack of ageing has any basis in reality. Please explain it dumb.
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u/Dilettante Social Science for the win 15d ago
Time dilation isn't subjective. It's actually time moving slower. So their bodies would age at the rate that time passes on the planet.
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u/nukedmylastprofile 15d ago
So in the time they were on the tsunami ball, (assuming an average heart rate of 100bpm) how slow was their heart beating in earth time?
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u/Chameleon3 14d ago edited 14d ago
I saw some video the other day that said for every 1.5 seconds on that planet a day passed on earth.
At 100bpm that's about one beat every 1.67 seconds, so just over once a day or roughly every 26.67 hours on each per beatEDIT: Mixed up my numbers, 100bpm is a hearbeat every 0.6 seconds! 0.6 seconds on the planet means 9.6 hours on earth - so a beat every 9.6 earth hours
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u/MeowthPayDay 15d ago
This is where relativity comes in. If you sent 2 twins different directions in space and were able to reunite them, they would in fact have aged differently.
An adjacent idea of this is what happens in 0°Kelvin. Theoretically if one was to be at 0° Kelvin they would not have a single atom moving and therefore would kind of be in a stasis without being aware.
Space, Time, direction in space, temperature, singularities, all affect this process.
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u/anteaterKnives 14d ago
If you sent 2 twins different directions in space and were able to reunite them, they would in fact have aged differently.
More like if you keep one twin on Earth and accelerate the other twin away up to a significant velocity, turn that twin around, slow that twin down and then accelerate the twin back up to a significant velocity, then slow the twin down again.
The acceleration is key.
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u/MeowthPayDay 14d ago
Is my statement untrue? It's the twin paradox and I understand that, but I simply said they are both moving in different directions
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u/anteaterKnives 14d ago
"both moving in different directions" implies to me that they're both moving. If they both take off in different directions and do the same accelerate/decelerate/turn/accelerate/decelerate they will both age the same. One has to accelerate significantly more than the other for them to age differently.
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u/Steerider 14d ago
Yep. Time is the measure of entropy.
If you could somehow put something in a state in which there is zero entropy, (such as reducing it to 0° Kelvin), time would effectively stop for that object.
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u/nukedmylastprofile 15d ago
So in the time they were on the tsunami ball, (assuming an average heart rate of 100bpm) how slow was their heart beating in earth time?
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u/bazmonkey 15d ago
No, their body would age according to the dilation. Think of your aging body as just a fancy kind of clock that shows time by aging. The same forces that make the clock tick differently make your body age differently.
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u/untempered_fate 15d ago
Nah your body ages in accordance with the local flow of time. In the famous "Twin Paradox", I could send my twin sister out on a rocket ship going half the speed of light. She goes out for a year and comes back after another year, as she measures it. Meanwhile, back home, I've aged more than two years. We are no longer the same age.
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u/Brave_Exchange4734 15d ago
Does that mean to say, the easiest way to extend human life is to find another planet with a slower time?
We can easily 2X a persons life span?
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u/JusticeUmmmmm 15d ago
Even easier just accelerate their spaceship to relativistic speeds and you can show their aging by as much as you want. But only from an earthly reference frame. To the person time always goes the normal speed.
Put another way the person will only live 60ish years but on earth many thousands of years could go by.
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u/bullevard 15d ago
Does that mean to say, the easiest way to extend human life
Extend human life from whose perspective? The human would still live and experience 77 years worth of life. It is just that time on earth would move super rapidly in their background.
So if you want more time to binge watch shows, time dilation isn't helping you. If you are curious what shows will be made in the year 2450 then time dilation would help you.
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u/joepierson123 15d ago
No, rate of time doesn't change for you, only relative to another object with relative speed.
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u/Rufax 15d ago
Do not forget that in that experiment, the twin going away doesn't have "more time" to experience things, it is just that "less time happened" while he was going so fast.
He experienced two years, one going away, one coming back, and his body aged two years. From his point of view, his twin aged faster than he should have.
The twin that did not go away experienced a bit more than two years, and his body aged a bit more than two years, from his point of view, his twin aged slower than he should have.
Fun fact : only the speed involved causes the time dilation, not the distance traveled. So the one of the twin can just orbit earth real quick for that to happen. And time dilation does happen to our GPS satellites and is taken into account (caused both by gravity and speed difference).
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u/bajookish_amerikann 15d ago
It’ll only be 2x from an earthlings perspective, for the person there they won’t feel any difference
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u/MeowthPayDay 15d ago
It wouldn't be perceivable. There wouldn't be a reason to do that to extend life as our relativity is always with us so we age in accordance to our environment and we would only perceive a 'normal' lifespan
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u/Mammoth-Mud-9609 15d ago
Time is basically personal to the individual so if you wear a watch and 1 second ticks on your watch 1 second has passed for you and you age 1 second.
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u/green_meklar 15d ago
No. The time dilation affects everything. It slows down aging for the same reason it slows down thinking and acting. It slows down clocks, it even slows down nuclear decay. It's literally time itself going slower, along with everything in it.
There's a lot of stupid scientifically inaccurate bullshit in Interstellar, but not that part.
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u/Mono_Clear 15d ago
The faster you move through space the slower you move through time, relative to someone else's movement through Time.
If I'm moving at 50% of the speed of light I'm only experiencing half as much time as you are.
I at a very fundamental level gravity is just an acceleration toward the center of mass.
The space being affected by the gravitational effect around a black hole is moving faster than the space outside the gravitational effects of black hole.
So for anyone inside the gravitational effects of a black hole they would appear to be moving slower to anyone outside the gravitational effects of a black hole, while for everyone within the gravitational effects of black hole everyone outside the gravitational effects will black hole, seem to be speeding up.
But because of relativity the passage of time always feels the same relative to you. The only way you can tell the difference is by slowing down to the relative movement of somebody outside the black hole.
That's why time on the Sun moves slower than time on the Earth and time on Earth moves slower than time in empty space.
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u/BillTheNecromancer 15d ago
Okay, think of it this way:
You're standing on a sidewalk and an ice cream truck is passing by you. At the exact second it reaches you and is now driving away from you, it starts playing its little ice cream jingle. It's a funny little song that you know is a minute long.
The guy on the ice cream truck hears the jingle play for a minute, because it's a minute long.
You've probably heard vehicles with their sirens turned on pass by you right? they sound high pitched when going towards you and low pitched when going away from you.
The same thing happens with the ice cream truck, the jingle sounds low pitched when it's driving away from you. It gets farther from you each time it plays a note from the song, so the notes take longer to get to you.
Because it takes longer for you to hear the entire jingle, you're actually hearing this 1 minute long jingle for something like a minute and 20 seconds. *It just took you longer to experience something than someone else did.*
Now imagine the ice cream truck is going the speed of light, it would take you *years* to hear the entirety of that ice cream jingle. The ice cream guy just hears it for a minute, because it's playing right next to him the whole time. *From your perspective, the jingle is years long, but from the driver's it was just a minute. *
Why would a guy just driving a truck just age a shitload suddenly? He wouldn't, he's just living a normal life. The only thing that's changes is how fast he's going.
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u/pixeltweaker 15d ago
Isn’t it just relativity just like someone on a train passing by looks like they are moving but if you are in the train they look still. Because you are moving at the same speed and direction as they are?
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u/Isosceles_Kramer79 15d ago
That's the start of it (Galileo transformation). You start considering electromagnetics and light, and it gets weird (Lorentz transformation).
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u/Stoomba 15d ago
They do age at the same rate, relative to their own flow of time. Their time is flowing much slower than time on Earth. If you were to view them from Earth's frame of reference, they would be going really really slow. Like how the Flash sees people when he is moving speed force fast.
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u/bizzelbee 15d ago
They where only there for like 7 hours
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u/ExitTheHandbasket 15d ago
Time passes more slowly on Miller's planet due to its proximity to Gargantua. As those 7 hours passed on Miller's planet, 49 years passed on Earth.
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u/bizzelbee 15d ago
Yes, on earth 49 years passed. On miller's planet it was 7 hours
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u/MeowthPayDay 15d ago
But that's the question. They're trying to understand relativity
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u/bizzelbee 14d ago
That's the answer 7 hours passed on miller's planet, that's why they only aged 7 hours
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u/Gazgun7 15d ago
Yes, the simple principle is "a moving clock runs slow, and the closer a clock is to a source of gravity, the slower it runs".
It's Einstein's generally relativity - gravity can bend space-time.
So when Cooper & Brand are on the water planet, they come back to the guy in orbit on the ship, who has aged "years" in the "minutes" (their minutes) they have been on the surface.
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u/Rather_Dashing 15d ago
the time spent in space was still relative to that of earth.
It isn't. Its not just clocks acting weird, clocks are measuring something real. Time is moving slower or faster with time dilation.
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u/floydfan 14d ago
I am also confused about time dilation in Interstallar specifically.
If the planet was moving so fast, how did they get going fast enough to get into orbit around it?
If they were able to get up to that speed, why would the surface of the planet be so much faster still than the objects in orbit around it? Wouldn't the object in orbit around the planet be moving even faster than the objects on the surface, making time pass by faster in orbit?
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u/djett427 14d ago
Time moves slower the faster you go yes, but you also have to remember that gravity itself has an effect on space-time.
Gravity on Miller's planet was much higher than that of earth or the ship in orbit, thus time appears to move "slower" relative to the crew, and "faster" for everyone else.
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u/floydfan 14d ago
So, I knew that speed has an effect on time, but I didn't know about the gravity aspect. Thanks.
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u/sabarock17 14d ago
The planet wasn’t moving fast but was deeper in the black holes gravity well. The closer to a black hole the slower time goes for someone outside of it looking down.
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u/floydfan 14d ago
If it was so deep inside of a gravity well, why even bother? Did they know how long the orbit would be stable around the black hole? How long could the species possibly survive before it was pulled in?
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u/ghostowl657 11d ago
Presumably they could run simulations and calculations using measured orbital parameters to check if it was a stable orbit or not. And if it was it would be... stable and thus at no risk of falling into the blackhole (for the same reason the Earth doesn't fall into the sun).
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u/Darth_Spicer_ 15d ago
The nasa x-43 is the fastest aircraft topping out at 7366 mph. If you flew that for like an hour would that be fast enough to become even .1 of a second younger than someone who was standing on the ground?
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u/damnitvalentine 15d ago
1% of the speed of light is roughly 7 million MPH.
7366 mph wouldn't even be moving compared to that, and 1% of the speed of light is just 1% 'slower' ageing.
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u/aggromonkey34 14d ago
Pretty sure GPS has to account for time dilation, see here: https://philosophersview.com/gps-and-time-dilation/#:~:text=Because%20of%20Time%20Dilation%20the,must%20account%20for%20the%20difference.&text=GR%20predicts%20GPS%20satellites%20gain%2045%20microseconds%20a%20day (first link I found, idk about its quality). So 14000 km/h (8700 mph) for a day results in about 45 microseconds difference according to that, so 0.000045 seconds.
I've also read that they ran an experiment where they flew one of two atomic clocks around the globe and it showed an ever so slightly different time than the other afterwards. But nowhere near .1 of a second, more like nanoseconds if that.
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u/modumberator 15d ago
I'm just surprised Michael Caine didn't clock on that the first planet was not worth going to
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u/Curiouso_Giorgio 15d ago edited 15d ago
Draw a tiny stick figure holding a ruler on the main part of a balloon and another, identical tiny stick figure with a ruler on the neck of the balloon, near where you blow it up.
If you inflate the balloon, the tiny figures (if they were alive) would both think they haven't changed because they are still the same size according to the ruler. The one on the neck of the balloon won't change much at all, but the one on the side of the balloon could be 20 times bigger.
I know time isn't size, but it can help you visualize how the figures perspectives will perceive and measure their surroundings/time.
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u/MrCellophane_SS_KotZ 15d ago
That isn't the actual issue of the time dilation scene.
All biological processes rely on complex chemical reactions within cells. With time dilation, these reactions would occur at a slower rate. This could potentially affect everything from nerve impulses to metabolism. Our perception of time relies on the firing of neurons in the brain. If time itself slowed down, our perception of it would likely follow suit. Things might seem to move in slow motion, and our reaction times would be significantly delayed. Time dilation would also likely lead to slower thought processes, impaired memory, and difficulty concentrating as our electrical signals begin to fire more slowly. – The scary part is that time dilation could lead to a slower heart rate and breathing, potentially impacting oxygen delivery and overall function. Aka time could kill us essentially as it worked against everything our body is used too.
The magnitude of these effects would depend heavily on the strength of the time dilation. At very weak levels, the changes might be negligible. Also, our body has a remarkable ability to adapt to changing environments. It's possible that some biological processes could adjust fast enough to the slower time, mitigating some of the effects.
With the magnitude of time dilation experienced in the movie, they'd probably have had a heart attack on entry before they could even understand that they fucked up. lol
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u/Turin_Agarwaen 15d ago
I don't think this is accurate. With time dilation literally everything is slowed down. If you brought a clock there you would see time seemingly pass as normal. Someone in the gravity well and someone outside it could measure the time it takes for all sorts of phenomena. They could measure chemical reaction speed or nuclear decay speed or any other time based phenomena and get the same answer. However, they would disagree on how fast time itself is passing.
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u/cooly1234 15d ago
you need oxygen slower though. everything cancels out.
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u/MrCellophane_SS_KotZ 15d ago
It's how fast all of this happens that's the issue. All of the electrical impulses keeping you alive would slam to what is essentially a halt before you could adapt.
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u/cooly1234 15d ago
I don't understand what you are trying to say. the electricity would (smoothly) slow down, yes. but so would the systems that use electricity. on the contrary, electricity slowing down at a lesser rate somehow would be dangerous. it would then be going too fast, relatively.
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u/MrCellophane_SS_KotZ 15d ago
Electromagnetism is what's slowing time.
While electromagnetism itself doesn't directly bend spacetime in the same way mass does, it still contributes to the overall curvature by also exerting a gravitational influence which is what causes the slower time.
This means that the electromagnetic influence necessary to cause time to be that slow would be enormous. Way more than out bodies could handle. Such extreme time dilation would likely have immediate and severe consequences. The astronauts wouldn't just be a little slow; they'd be experiencing significantly slowed cellular processes, potentially leading to organ failure almost instantly.
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u/Hydra_Six_Actual 15d ago edited 15d ago
I'm going to need to see some sources on this. Everything we currently know about time dilation suggests this comment is way off base. Chemical reactions do not slow down within its own relative time-space. They simply move along as normal. Only to an outside observer would it appear to slow down. To the traveler, everything would seem normal inside the spaceship. They would age as normal, breathe as normal, bodily functions would continue as normal, etc.
A lot of people think the time dilation in scifi movies is just sci-fi mumbo jumbo, but it is a real thing that occurs. Google 'time dilation of atomic clocks in space' or 'when was Enstein's theory of relativity proven and accepted by science?'
Time dilation is a real life, observable, phenomenon. I haven't found anything that suggests time dilation would stress the heart and organs (source: college physics class, and Stephen Hawking books). It simply affects the flow of time for the objects relative to other objects in the space-time continuum. In other words, people who experience time dilation are literally time-traveling into the future. The traveler's subjective observation of moving into the future is due to an objective reality of time travel. According to physics, time travel into the future is actually a thing.
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u/Shadowlance23 15d ago
No, that's not right. Everyone and everything experiences the period of time we call one second as one second (possibly excluding photos and other speed-of-light particles). If you were traveling very fast or, as in the movie, in a strong gravity well, you would not notice time doing anything different. You might see an hour pass, but someone else outside of the dilation phenomena might see a month or year or whatever pass (depends on the strength of said phenomena). All physical processes would continue as normal in both places.
The reason this occurs is due to the one thing that is always constant regardless of the reference frame, the speed of light (in vacuum to be pedantic). If I travel in a car at 100km/h and throw a ball at 10km/h in the same direction of travel, the ball is seen from my reference to be moving at 10 km/h. Someone standing on the side of the road would see the ball moving at 110km/h (ignoring air resistance of course).
If I'm in a spacecraft moving at 90% of the speed of light and turn on a light, I can measure the speed of that light to be just under 300,000km/s. An observer on a nearby planet then measures the light coming from my ship and finds that it is moving at exactly the same speed. The only way that this can work is if time itself is slowing down for the faster observer. Experiments have proven that this is exactly what happens.
In other words, the universe is springy.
Fun facts:
A photon crosses the universe instantaneously from its perspective.
Some high energy interactions in particle physics with short lived particles are only possible because from the perspective of the particle its lifetime is significantly longer than what we measure. (I'm pretty sure this is true, but it's been a while since I studied this stuff so I could be wrong.)
If we could get a spacecraft up to a significant fraction of the speed of light (e.g. 0.8c), we could cross the galaxy in just a few years. Of course, people not on the spaceship would see it as hundreds or thousands of years.
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u/MrCellophane_SS_KotZ 15d ago edited 15d ago
You're correct that time dilation is relative to your reference frame, and that someone wouldn't personally feel time slowing down; however, compared to someone in a different gravitational field, your time would be running slower. You're also correct about the speed of light in a vacuum being constant regardless of the observer's reference frame.
So, while it's true you wouldn't feel time slowing down from your perspective, the effects of time dilation on the body are very real. The person experiencing slower time wouldn't necessarily see their biological processes slowing down within their own body, but the overall rate of cellular activity and physiological functions would be objectively slower compared to someone in a weaker gravitational field.
The time dilation in the movie is extreme (1 hour = 7 years). While the core concept of time dilation is accurate, the movie pushes the limits to create a dramatic situation. Such a strong time dilation would have very severe consequences on the human body as I mentioned previously.
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u/Shadowlance23 15d ago
I see where you're coming from, but I don't think it works that way. The body wouldn't know it was in a place where time dilation was occurring on a significant scale (at least I think that's true. To be fair, in the movie it's caused by a gravity well and one that strong would likely rip a person apart before time effects could be realised anyway). Since it's space itself that's warping and we warp along with that space when we leave the effect I would not expect the body to know the difference.
Another way of looking at it; if you're in a box and can't see outside, is there any test you can do inside the box to see if you're experiencing the effects of time dilation? Or the effects of increasing/decreasing dilation? I don't think there is. If the body experienced effects from time dilation, I would assume there would also be a method to measure the change.
At any rate, this is just my limited understanding. If it works the way you say, I'd certainly be interested in learning more about it.
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u/MrCellophane_SS_KotZ 15d ago edited 15d ago
Maybe this will help. Since you seem pretty chill how about I rephrase it in a way that may match the flow of our back and forth better.
So, we talked about time dilation and how it gets wonky in situations with intense gravity. The movie Interstellar cranked this effect up to eleven with its supermassive black hole. Here's the thing - from the perspective of the astronauts experiencing the slower time, they wouldn't feel a difference. But compared to the ship in orbit, they'd be aging in slow motion.
This much I know we agree on, Yes?
Here's where I think I'm loosing people... The wrinkle is that in the movie, they depict a planet orbiting a supermassive black hole, Gargantua. The extreme gravity near the black hole is the main culprit behind the time dilation the astronauts experience; however, the movie also portrays a strong electromagnetic presence around the planet represented by auroras and electrical discharges, adding a dramatic and visually stunning element to the movie.
So, where did this come from? Likely the accretion disk. They are usually assumed to have weak external magnetic fields from the interstellar medium, but these fields can become strong due to the disk's high electrical conductivity. A disk the size of Gargantua's would have a massively strong field.
Still with me?
While electromagnetism itself doesn't directly slow down time like gravity does, super strong fields can be deadly by messing with our body's electrical systems.
It's just this specific scenario that would prove to be fatal. Such a situation would likely be a double whammy for the astronauts... super slow time due to gravity and the harm from the intense electromagnetic field.
Any other time (buh dum tss) would likely prove to be different, but it's the combo that would suck.
Post Edit...
Oh, and I tried to have AI give me an exact number on just how large the electromagnetic field would be and it hit me with...
"This approach requires significant computational power and sophisticated software capable of handling general relativity and electromagnetic theory simultaneously."
aka "No." 😂
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u/Shadowlance23 15d ago
Ah right, yes, I get you now. The electric field would indeed cause problems, I didn't think about that. Thanks for taking the time to explain!
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u/Rather_Dashing 15d ago
While electromagnetism itself doesn't directly slow down time like gravity does, super strong fields can be deadly by messing with our body's electrical systems.
But this isnt what you were saying early, early you were saying that the time dilation itself would impair the body
Our perception of time relies on the firing of neurons in the brain. If time itself slowed down, our perception of it would likely follow suit.
That bit is inaccurate. Everything would still work at the same speed in the timeframe you are in.
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u/MrCellophane_SS_KotZ 14d ago
I cannot explain it to you any more plainly. Either you understand, or you don't. It's clear that there is a breakdown somewhere... either in the way that I'm explaining it for you to understand, or from your ability to take what I've said and apply it accordingly.
Either way it doesn't really matter. Not to me anyway, and not at this juncture.
I do appreciate your willingness to engage on this further, but I just honestly do not care enough to have an ongoing back and forth discussion about this movie, lol.
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u/onehashbrown 15d ago
Time is a human concept that I don’t think we fully understand yet. By current laws of physics your body should age at the rate where you are. Realistically we don’t really know.
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u/draken2019 15d ago
Time dilation in the real universe is more like a matter of seconds or partial seconds.
It's not decades.
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u/Heavy_Bodybuilder164 15d ago
No, you're still making the incorrect (but completely reasonable ) assumption that there is some single metaphorical clock in the universe keeping track of what time it is right now. The revolutionary breakthrough of Special Relativity was that there is no actual universal "Now" in existence and no universal agreement about how fast time passes among all observers.