17 insane ( but true ) facts about time ..
Of all the physical constituents may be Time is the only one which affects us the most. What is time for you ? We have 17 insane ( but true ) facts about time.
1. Time passes faster for your face than for you feet ( assuming that you are standing ). According to Einstein's theory of relativity the closer you are to Earth the slower the time will for you. This prophecy has been proved
A year at the top of Mt. Everest would be 15 microseconds shorter than that at the sea level of Earth.
2. A second isn't what you think it is. Scientifically, it's not defined as 1/60th of a minute, but as "the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom".
3. Time taken for Earth to rotate is 24 hours , right ! No the exact time taken for Earth to rotate is 23 hours 56 minutes and 4.2 seconds. The reason for taking 24 hours for a day is because everyday the Earth moves further in its orbit away from Sun - and the change in its position lenghthens the day slightly.
4. When Dinosaurs were alive a year on Earth used to take 370 days, but today it is about 365.25 days, slower. The Earth's spin is getting closer because the Moon's gravity is dragging away the speed, so days are getting longer by 1.6 millisecond per century.
5. The smallest scientific measurement of time as an unit is Planck time. It takes about five hundred and fifty thousand trillion, trillion and trillion Planck times to blink once, quickly.
6. On Mercury a day is two years long.
7. There's no such thing as "now" as far as physics is concerned. Space and time are fluid, affected by gravity and your speed. Einstein put it like this: "For us physicists, the distinction between past, present and future is only an illusion, however persistent."
8. Because light takes time to reach us , so everything we see is the past image of that object. The Sun we see out of our window is 8 minutes old , the nearest star Proxima Centauri we see around is 4.2 years old.
9. New experiences really do seem to be longer in the memory than familiar ones. It's called the "oddball effect", and it seems to be why time feels like it's going faster as you get older – because more stuff is familiar to you.
10. Time moves slower as you move faster. If you travel to star Sirius at 99% of the speed of light, the people you left behind on Earth would age by 17 years but your age would only be 2.5 years of your age.
11. The Universe is 13.8 billion years old. If you compressed that into a year - with the Big Bang happening in 00.00.01 in 1st january , then the time when dinosaurs would be wiped out would be 29th December and modern humans would appear in 11.54 pm of december 31st. Christopher Colombus would sail around the Atlantic one second before midnight.
12. The most accurate clock ever built is the Strontium clock. It is accurate to a second over 15 billion years.
13. The oldest known object in the universe is a galaxy called z8_GND_5296. It's 13.8 billion years old and only 700 millions years younger than the Universe.
14. The oldest known Earth object is a 4.4 billion years old crystal , a zircon. It's only 160 million years younger than Earth.
15. The reason clocks show the same time across whole countries is that it makes train timetables easier to run. Until the 19th century, towns set their clocks by the local noon, so clocks in Bristol would be 11 minutes behind London. That meant people kept missing their trains, so railway companies began using standard, London-based UK time, starting with the Great Western Railway in 1840.
16. Distant galaxies appear to be moving faster than nearby ones, suggesting that the universe is accelerating as it expands. The usual theory to explain that is a mysterious force in the universe known as "dark energy". But a Spanish physicist has proposed an alternative possibility, that the further-away, older galaxies only seem to be moving faster because in the past, time was faster. If he's right, in a few billion years, "everything will be frozen, like a snapshot of one instant, forever".
17. Next week, your watch will be one second slow. The fact that the Earth's rotation is slowing, and therefore the days are getting longer, means that our 24-hour day is very slightly off. Every so often, the International Earth Rotation Service, the body which regulates astronomical time, has to add a second – called a "leap second"
1. Time passes faster for your face than for you feet ( assuming that you are standing ). According to Einstein's theory of relativity the closer you are to Earth the slower the time will for you. This prophecy has been proved
A year at the top of Mt. Everest would be 15 microseconds shorter than that at the sea level of Earth.
2. A second isn't what you think it is. Scientifically, it's not defined as 1/60th of a minute, but as "the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom".
3. Time taken for Earth to rotate is 24 hours , right ! No the exact time taken for Earth to rotate is 23 hours 56 minutes and 4.2 seconds. The reason for taking 24 hours for a day is because everyday the Earth moves further in its orbit away from Sun - and the change in its position lenghthens the day slightly.
4. When Dinosaurs were alive a year on Earth used to take 370 days, but today it is about 365.25 days, slower. The Earth's spin is getting closer because the Moon's gravity is dragging away the speed, so days are getting longer by 1.6 millisecond per century.
5. The smallest scientific measurement of time as an unit is Planck time. It takes about five hundred and fifty thousand trillion, trillion and trillion Planck times to blink once, quickly.
6. On Mercury a day is two years long.
7. There's no such thing as "now" as far as physics is concerned. Space and time are fluid, affected by gravity and your speed. Einstein put it like this: "For us physicists, the distinction between past, present and future is only an illusion, however persistent."
8. Because light takes time to reach us , so everything we see is the past image of that object. The Sun we see out of our window is 8 minutes old , the nearest star Proxima Centauri we see around is 4.2 years old.
9. New experiences really do seem to be longer in the memory than familiar ones. It's called the "oddball effect", and it seems to be why time feels like it's going faster as you get older – because more stuff is familiar to you.
10. Time moves slower as you move faster. If you travel to star Sirius at 99% of the speed of light, the people you left behind on Earth would age by 17 years but your age would only be 2.5 years of your age.
11. The Universe is 13.8 billion years old. If you compressed that into a year - with the Big Bang happening in 00.00.01 in 1st january , then the time when dinosaurs would be wiped out would be 29th December and modern humans would appear in 11.54 pm of december 31st. Christopher Colombus would sail around the Atlantic one second before midnight.
12. The most accurate clock ever built is the Strontium clock. It is accurate to a second over 15 billion years.
13. The oldest known object in the universe is a galaxy called z8_GND_5296. It's 13.8 billion years old and only 700 millions years younger than the Universe.
14. The oldest known Earth object is a 4.4 billion years old crystal , a zircon. It's only 160 million years younger than Earth.
15. The reason clocks show the same time across whole countries is that it makes train timetables easier to run. Until the 19th century, towns set their clocks by the local noon, so clocks in Bristol would be 11 minutes behind London. That meant people kept missing their trains, so railway companies began using standard, London-based UK time, starting with the Great Western Railway in 1840.
16. Distant galaxies appear to be moving faster than nearby ones, suggesting that the universe is accelerating as it expands. The usual theory to explain that is a mysterious force in the universe known as "dark energy". But a Spanish physicist has proposed an alternative possibility, that the further-away, older galaxies only seem to be moving faster because in the past, time was faster. If he's right, in a few billion years, "everything will be frozen, like a snapshot of one instant, forever".
17. Next week, your watch will be one second slow. The fact that the Earth's rotation is slowing, and therefore the days are getting longer, means that our 24-hour day is very slightly off. Every so often, the International Earth Rotation Service, the body which regulates astronomical time, has to add a second – called a "leap second"
Comments