Gravity is not a force according to the general theory of relativity; it is a curvature in spacetime. I don't remember my astrophysics class well enough to explain clearly why it works, but I think the time dilation is caused by acceleration, of which gravity is a special case. There have been tests with atomic clocks at different altitudes, and with different acceleration, and the differences match those predicted by the theories of relativity.I don't see how a one-dimensional infinitely long train track with time being the train could be affected by gravity, since as far as I know, time doesn't have a physical form that gravity could manipulate.
Since time slows as gravity increases, this theory would predict that time stops at the singularity of a black hole, rather than speeds up.Oddly enough, if gravity does manipulate time, black holes could possibly be wormholes between universes due to time being distorted to the point of… Something or other. The point is that time would move at an exponentially increasing rate, possibly reaching infinity times infinity or something crazy like that. (Now aren't we glad that the universe isn't a computer? It'd have crashed so many times trying to compute infinity if it was.)
Right. I was back-to-front then, I guess.David wrote:Since time slows as gravity increases, this theory would predict that time stops at the singularity of a black hole, rather than speeds up.
Alright, this is what I was thinking of. This is why I'm not going to be a physics major.David wrote:I am not sure if you are being serious, but people do age in space at the same rate people on Earth do. If you insist on taking gravitational time dilation into account, people in space will actually age slightly faster because time is less distorted around them by gravity then it is for people on Earth. However, this difference would be on the scale of nanoseconds.
