Gravitational Time Dilation

Lately, I have been watching the TV series Stargate. I enjoy the show very much. All that science stuff interests me, though some of it I question the realness of. Last night I watched an episode entitled “A Matter of Time”. The title matched the plot line very well. I won’t give anything away, but the basic plot was that a black hole was forming on the other side of Earth’s stargate. This black hole, for a reason that was never really given kept the wormhole the stargate creates from being shut down. Soon, the black hole’s gravity starts affecting the military based in which the stargate is held. The part that intrigued me, and even sparked question in my mind, was that, as the gravity from the black hole increased, the time within the gravitational pull was slowed down. I don’t know if you already have researched this TV show phenomenon, or if you’re even interested, but I’ll fill you in anyway. It seems, if I have researched properly, that this is a real occurrence. I have read that in places of lower gravitational potential, time goes slower than in places with greater gravitational potential. So, in layman’s terms, the closer a person is to the center of an object large enough to have a gravitational pull, the slower time goes. If that wasn’t funny enough, I read that to the person already mentioned, the time seems exactly the same in either place. You’re probably wondering “then how do we know this happens?” Well, Albert Einstein, in his brilliance, theorized that this would happen. If that’s not enough proof for you, well some scientists got together and conducted an experiment. In this experiment, they put two atomic clocks, one in each plane, and flew to two different elevations. After the planes landing, they saw that the two clocks displayed two different times. Pretty crazy, isn’t it? Now you are wondering “what does this have to do with my life?” Well, I don’t really know. I found this profound enough to share with you. I though about how this could be used anywhere from creating electricity to even time travel. Though I won’t bore you with all the gruesome details of my thought, at least at this time, I would encourage any and all of my readers to ponder all that I have delivered here to you. I would love some of you to watch a Stargate episode or two and see if you love it as much as I. If you would like to check this happening out more, go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_time_dilation. In the case that you don’t understand all of the formulas and terms in above site, like me, the site http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/en/Outreach/Explore_Our_Universe/Why_Does_Gravity_Slow_Time?/2/ has it all in less scientific words. :) Look Out for my Next Post, Benjamin Hudson