The world’s most accurate atomic clock has clearly proved the nearly 100-year-old theory by Albert Einstein that time is a relative concept and the higher you live above sea level the faster you should age.
Einstein’s theory of relativity states that time and space are not as constant as everyday life would suggest. He suggested that the only true constant, the speed of light, meant that time can run faster or slower depending on how high you are, and how fast you are travelling.
Now researchers have demonstrated the true nature of Einstein’s theory for the first time with an incredibly accurate atomic clock that is able to keep time to within one second in about 3.7 billion years — roughly the same length of time that life has existed on Earth, The Independent reported.
James Chin-Wen Chou and his colleagues from the US National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado, found that when they monitored two such clocks positioned just a foot apart in height above sea level, they found that time really does run more quickly the higher you are — just as Einstein predicted.
“These precise clocks reveal the effects of gravitational pull, so if we position one clock closer to a planet, you also increase the gravitational pull and time actually runs slower than for another, similar clock positioned higher up,” Chou said.
“No one has seen such effects before with clocks, which is why we wanted to see if these effects are there. We would say our results agree with Einstein’s theory — we weren’t expecting any discrepancies and we didn’t find any,” he explained.
The atomic clocks used in the study are based on the tiny vibrations of aluminium atoms trapped in an electric field.
These vibrations are in the same frequency range of ultraviolet light, detected by lasers, which effectively means that the atomic timepieces are optical clocks, accurate enough to measure billionths of a second and to keep time accurately over millions of years.
It means that the clocks were able to perceive the dilation of time with height above ground that was first predicted by Einstein.
For every foot above ground, for instance, the clocks showed that someone would age about 90 billionths of a second faster over a 79-year lifetime, Chou said.
The time dilation experiment, published in the journal Science, is vivid proof of how time is not what we think it is.
Besides, the scientists demonstrated that when the atomic clocks were altered in a way that mimics the effect of travelling through space, time began to slow down, as the theory of relativity says it should.
Keywords: accurate atomic clock, Einstein's theory
In India it's become a fashion to comments on the scientific result.This is what becoming a status,until and unless if we not encourage the research in India it will be difficult to develop the country scientifically.
It's really hilarious that whenever something new is discovered or
proved,Indians want to claim that their ancestors knew it thousands of
years ago.
Aeroplane-Pushpankviman
Antibiotics-Turmeric etc.
If everything is in the ancient vedas,why don't we use it.Only when
something is discovered that it is discovered in
profound,cryptic,allusive and elusive peotic passages in vedas.Why
can't we see it as selfdelusion of grandeur.It's a fact that Indians
are not spearheading scientific research.Accept it.If possible do
something about it rather than demeaning every scientific result.
There is one basic assumption which is not mentioned in the article. Is it the time or the clock that slows down with gravity? It can be either. They have assumed that clock is not slowed down by gravity, and then conclude that time is slowed down. How can that be regarded as a proof of Einstein's theory.?
The concept of time dilation was known to the ancient savants in India, thousands of years before it became clear through the scientific theories and experiments, and its allusions are there in the Vedas. Not only this, the conservation of mass and energy and their interchangeability were mentioned with profound discussions in the Vedas. Our scientific knowledge primarily deals with the concepts of matter and energy and their relations vis a vis time and space but the vedas mentioned that the macrocosm is made up of matter, energy and consciousness (or chaitanya), the last one remaining intangible to science as of date. This really intrigue me.
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