On Time

   I have never had a good sense of time. It has always been something of a curse to me, that time seems to pass more quickly than I give it credit. When pondering this, I discovered that I have a very vague understanding of the physics behind time, and so I suppose it stands to reason.

   Being as I am one who loves a good mystery, I decided to delve a little deeper into the subject. I already knew that time varies based on an object's mass, that is, its gravitational force. I had long believed that time was a man-made thing, stagnant and boring. But upon researching further, I find that there is a whole world of knowledge that I couldn't even scratch the surface of, and even more that will take me a while to understand. I'm sure I will be posting more on this topic later.

   Here is an excerpt from a clever website I came across:

"There are a few dozen GPS satellites floating high above the Earth. Each satellite carries an atomic clock that, when on Earth, is perfectly precise and in sync with Earth time. However, when lifted to the less dense gravity of the upper atmosphere, the satellites’ atomic clocks speed up. Were an observer to fly up to one of these satellites and watch the on-board atomic clock, he would see no difference in the length of a second. It would still be that familiar tick, tick, tick of Earth seconds. At that level of gravity, he, too, would be moving faster through time and would therefore see one second to be one plain old second. But, from here on the Earth’s surface and from within our denser gravitational field, we can see that the seconds pass a little more quickly on the satellites."
(For more information, click here.)