Spaceman Opus
09-25-2010, 01:42 AM
EDIT: OK, turns out I mixed up the definitions of longer vs. shorter (gimme a break, I'm sick as hell)...switch longer with shorter in all of my posts in this thread (not the quotes, they're right...just my addenda).
As in; if you live 1 foot above sea level, you'll live 90 billionths of a second longer than someone living at sea level.
Ultraprecise clock helps cut relativity down to size (http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-relativity-20100925,0,7205568.story)
Scientists show that Einstein's famous theory works at a down-to-Earth scale.
Among the oft-repeated predictions of Albert Einstein's famous theory of relativity is that if a twin travels through the cosmos on a high-speed rocket, when he returns to Earth he will be noticeably younger than the twin who stayed home.
Now physicists have demonstrated that the same is true even if the traveling twin is merely driving in a car about 20 mph. But in that case, when the twin gets home from the grocery store, he is only a tiny fraction of a nanosecond younger, according to a report in Friday's edition of the journal Science.
The reverse is often said to be true for a twin who spends time high on a mountaintop; general relativity predicts that time passes more quickly at greater altitudes because objects don't feel Earth's gravity quite as strongly. But the physicists found that a twin who lives just about a foot above sea level will age ever-so-slightly faster than a twin living at sea level.
In its paper, the team reported that the second hand of a clock positioned about two-thirds of a mile above an identical clock near Earth's surface will speed up only enough to tick out three extra seconds over the course of a million years.
Chou and his colleagues were able to observe an even smaller time dilation — in clocks separated by a just a foot — because they built a precise timepiece.
Their atomic clock, which would fill a large dining room table, works by calibrating the frequency of a laser to that of an aluminum ion. The oscillations of the laser are the equivalent of a traditional clock's ticks, but they occur far more rapidly — more than a million billion times per second.
That's about 100,000 times as fast as the tick rate of the microwave-based atomic clocks that currently set the time standard in the United States.
"We are able to divide time into finer chunks," Chou said.
In the elevation experiment, the aluminum-based atomic clocks let the researchers measure a difference of approximately 90 billionths of a second over a human's 79-year lifetime.
My city is 482 ft. above sea-level, so I get 43380 billionths of a second longer than sea-level dwellers! Suckers! :neener:
As in; if you live 1 foot above sea level, you'll live 90 billionths of a second longer than someone living at sea level.
Ultraprecise clock helps cut relativity down to size (http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-relativity-20100925,0,7205568.story)
Scientists show that Einstein's famous theory works at a down-to-Earth scale.
Among the oft-repeated predictions of Albert Einstein's famous theory of relativity is that if a twin travels through the cosmos on a high-speed rocket, when he returns to Earth he will be noticeably younger than the twin who stayed home.
Now physicists have demonstrated that the same is true even if the traveling twin is merely driving in a car about 20 mph. But in that case, when the twin gets home from the grocery store, he is only a tiny fraction of a nanosecond younger, according to a report in Friday's edition of the journal Science.
The reverse is often said to be true for a twin who spends time high on a mountaintop; general relativity predicts that time passes more quickly at greater altitudes because objects don't feel Earth's gravity quite as strongly. But the physicists found that a twin who lives just about a foot above sea level will age ever-so-slightly faster than a twin living at sea level.
In its paper, the team reported that the second hand of a clock positioned about two-thirds of a mile above an identical clock near Earth's surface will speed up only enough to tick out three extra seconds over the course of a million years.
Chou and his colleagues were able to observe an even smaller time dilation — in clocks separated by a just a foot — because they built a precise timepiece.
Their atomic clock, which would fill a large dining room table, works by calibrating the frequency of a laser to that of an aluminum ion. The oscillations of the laser are the equivalent of a traditional clock's ticks, but they occur far more rapidly — more than a million billion times per second.
That's about 100,000 times as fast as the tick rate of the microwave-based atomic clocks that currently set the time standard in the United States.
"We are able to divide time into finer chunks," Chou said.
In the elevation experiment, the aluminum-based atomic clocks let the researchers measure a difference of approximately 90 billionths of a second over a human's 79-year lifetime.
My city is 482 ft. above sea-level, so I get 43380 billionths of a second longer than sea-level dwellers! Suckers! :neener: