Albert Einstein with an artist’s concept of twisted space-time around Earth.
I have not posted on Froodee for quite some time. Thank God I have a universal alibi backed by no less than one of the world greatest scientists – Albert Einstein.
Yes, the gap in my writings is due to the fact that time is relative, flexible, bendable. I could have been away for a week or so, but in my mind I was just here a second ago.
I always get a quizzical look at people when I tell them I can never be late or too early for an appointment. Because time indeed is flexible. Oh, if only my boss at the office would realize that!
In 1905, Albert Einstein wrote his own treatise on the relativity of time, famously theorizing that time speeds up or slows down according to how fast an object is moving in relation to another object.
Thus, according to his hypothesis, a clock which is in motion ticks more slowly than an identical clock which is at rest — a phenomenon that Einstein called time dilation.
In a study published last week, the most accurate experiment yet into time dilation has proven the great German physicist to be right on target (and so do I. Yes! Time can be “managed”!)
An international team of researchers used a particle accelerator to whizz two beams of atoms around a doughnut-shaped course to represent Einstein’s faster-moving clocks.
They then timed the beams using high-precision laser spectroscopy and found that, compared with the outside world, time for these atomic travelers did indeed slow down.
The experiments took place at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg, Germany, and include researchers from that organization, the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching, and Mainz University.
The findings were published online Sunday by the journal Nature Physics.
The first measurement of Einstein’s time dilation took place in 1938, when US scientists used the Doppler effect — the change in pitch when a sound and the person hearing it are moving apart or closer together — as the measuring tool.
Einstein’s theory of relativity has become the basis for innumerable science fiction tales, for it opens up the prospect of bending and distorting time.
According to this theory, if one of two identical twins were launched into space at very high speed, when he returned home, he would be younger than his earthbound twin.
Ah, I would love to zoom out into space and return here a young guy of 15 or 17 again. Anybody out there who owns a spaceship?