2 ms·
It's a physics thing which affects all clocks. According to special relativity clocks on the Moon will run slower because the moon is orbiting the Earth, so th
by crote 4y ago
It's a physics thing which affects all clocks.
According to special relativity clocks on the Moon will run slower because the moon is orbiting the Earth, so the clock has a higher relative speed. However, general relativity says the clock will run faster, because the Moon has a smaller gravitational field than Earth.
In this case the second effect will dominate, so even a perfect clock will run faster: it's not the clock which is fast, it is time itself. GPS satellites have to deal with the same issue.
- px43 4y agoDo you think there are any physical phenomena that can be used that might be sensitive to relativistic effects? Something like a quartz crystal that actually vibrates at different speeds depending on how dilated the current reference frame is? Maybe something external, like if our sun would be emitting some sort of signal at a regular interval that everyone could sync up against. I wonder if, in the future, we will have a group of timekeeping satellites orbiting our sun. Maybe their orbit could be tweaked to have identical time dilation to Earth, and everyone can just sync off that. Maybe we can derive some time keeping mechanism from the black hole at the center of our galaxy, or maybe we will just realize that our obsession with timekeeping is a silly terrestrial habit, and not really important at scale.