The invisible force that governs our world you can feel it in your heartbeat from sunrise to sunset it is the eternal progress of events that occur seemingly irreversibly from the past through the present into the future without it we wouldn't be able to contemplate a universe giving rise to creatures such as ourselves to question the concept of time Einstein's theory of relativity states that the closer one is to a gravitational field of an object such as the earth example the slower time goes time will also flow slower if one object has a greater relativistic velocity than another if we imagine the famous twin experiment where one flies in a rocket into space with near the speed of light while the other twin stays on earth upon the return from her space flight she will notice her twin on earth as aged all of her in a way she has traveled into the future as time for her has flown more slowly relative to time on earth to take another example from the other side of the coin of relativity if you spend a year at the top of Mount Everest you can celebrate New Years 15 microseconds earlier than someone who has spent a year at sea level because they were closer to the curvature of space-time due to the Earth's mass so time flowed more slowly for them microseconds might seem incredibly insignificant to our day-to-day lives but understanding time dilation is crucial to making something like the GPS satellites work without taking into consideration the effects of general relativity errors in global positions would continue to accumulate at a rate of about 10 kilometers each day rendering GPS worthless considering this fluidity and somewhat counterintuitive nature time might seem nothing more but an illusion especially because time is used to define other quantities such as velocity and defining time by velocity of matter for example seems like circularity of definition not only that the operational definition does not address what the fundamental nature of time is it doesn't entail why events can happen forward and backwards in space while events can only happen forwards in time investigations into the relationship between space and time led physicists to define the space-time continuum general relativity is the primary framework for understanding how space-time works through advances in both theoretical and experimental investigations of space-time it has been shown that time can be distorted particularly at the edges of black holes the strontium atomic clock is the most precise clock ever devised by humans it's accurate to within a second over 15 billion years yet because of Einstein we know space and time are fluid and are affected by gravity and velocity and it may make us feel uncomfortable to think something so fundamental to our existence can be considered an illusion but quoting Einstein the distinction between the past present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.
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