1. Passage of time is faster for your face than for your feet (supposing you’re standing up). Einstein’s theory of relativity states that the nearer you are to the center of the Earth, the slower time passes – and this has been already measured. For an instance, at the top of Mount Everest, a year would be about 15 microseconds shorter than at sea level.
2. A second isn’t what just you consider it is. Technically, it’s not defined as 1/60th of a minute, but as “the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation consistent to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom”.
3. When the dinosaurs ruled the Earth, there were nearly 370 days in a year. The Earth’s rotation is getting slower because the moon’s gravity is acting as a drag, so days are getting lengthier, by about 1.7 milliseconds per century.
4. This one is good. A single day on Mercury is 58.6 Earth days long… and you thought your Mondays lasted forever! To be even more precise, for every 2 Mercury years, 3 Mercury days pass — a 3:2 spin-orbit resonance, caused by the planet’s varying elliptical orbit. So, while you get a bit bored waiting for the evenings on Mercury, at least you will be able to celebrate your birthday twice a day!
5. The least standard scientific amount of time is the “Planck time”. It only takes you about five hundred and fifty thousand trillion trillion trillion Planck times to blink one time, rapidly.
6. There’s nothing as “now” according to physics. Space and time are like fluid, affected by gravity and even your speed. Albert Einstein put it like this: “For us physicists, the distinction between past, present and future is only an illusion, however persistent.”
7. Since light takes time to reach us, whatever we see is in the past. The sun you can see in the sky is 8 minutes and 20 seconds old. The light from our nearby star, Proxima Centauri, is about 4 years old.
8. New experiences certainly do appear to be longer in the memory than familiar ones. It’s known as the “oddball effect”, and it appears to be why time feels like it’s going faster as you get older – since more stuff is familiar to you.
9. The most precise clock ever constructed is the strontium clock, which is precise to within a second over 15 billion years.
10. The oldest acknowledged thing in the universe is a galaxy called z8_GND_5296. It’s 13.1 billion years old – only 700 million years younger than the cosmos itself.
11. The cause behind why clocks show the same time across entire countries is that it makes train timetables easier to run. Till the 19th century, towns set their clocks by the local time or noon, so clocks in Bristol would be 11 minutes behind London. That destined people kept missing their trains, so railway firms began using standard, London-based UK time, initiating with the Great Western Railway in 1840.
12. Time might be crunching to a pause. Distant galaxies seem to be moving faster than close ones, signifying that the cosmos is accelerating as it expands. The normal theory to clarify that is a mysterious force in the cosmos known as “dark energy”. But a Spanish physicist has suggested an alternative prospect that the further-away, older galaxies only appear to be moving faster because in the past, time was faster. If he’s correct, in a few billion years, “everything will be frozen, like a photo of one instant, endlessly”.
13. Next week, your watch will be one second behind. The fact that the Earth’s spin is decelerating, and consequently the days are getting longer, means that our 24-hour day is very to some extent off. Every so frequently, the International Earth Rotation Service, the bodywhich standardizes astronomical time, has to add a second – called a “leap second” – to the clock to retain things consistent. The recent leap second was on June 30, 2015.
This post was written by Umer Abrar on Physics-Astronomy
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