MadSci Network: Physics |
In the words of my cosmologist friend Amy: "Gravity doesn't slow time." It seem like this this is contrary to your understanding of relativity and no doubt you'll want an explanation, so here it is: A phenomenon called time dilation does indeed occur when two inertial reference frames (non-accelerating points of view in which Newton's laws apply)are accelerating with respect to one another. In plain language: if you put a person in spaceship and and watch it accelerate away from Earth, time will appear to slow down for the person on the ship. But this time dilation is only apparent to you. The person on the ship will experience time on the ship passing normally. So time dilation does occur, *but* it only happens if one frame of reference is accelerating. If the spaceship in the previous example were sitting still or coasting at a constant speed with respect to the earth, we wouldn't see a time-stretch for the person on the ship. So it's not gravity that stretches time, it's the acceleration of two intertial reference frames with respect to one another. Any observers have to be in these separate frames of reference for them to see any effect. Now let's get back to your question. If you were standing on the surface of the earth with a Geiger counter and a radioactive sample (a lump of cesium 137, let's say) then you and the cesium would be in the same inertial reference frame. If you went to the moon and did your radioactivity experiment there, your Geiger counter still wouldn't ping any faster because you'd still be in the same reference frame. Even if you and the cesium were floating in the icy depths of space where there was a miniscule gravitational field, it wouldn't make the decay happen any faster. But if you put the cesium on the Space Shuttle, fired it away from you, and recorded the results with a super-duper mono-directional Geiger counter that could work over long distances, then you WOULD see the decay rate slow down!
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