• Question: I watched a film at the weekend and i was wondering about if some of the theories are true. Here they are.1. Gravity affects perception of time.2. all time may exist at once and we are just perceiving a moment within it.could you also exsplain these theory and tell me what you think? Thank you!

    Asked by coca cola :-) to Angela, Robert, Sarah on 21 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Robert Bowles

      Robert Bowles answered on 21 Nov 2014:

      There’s never a theoretical physicist around when you need one is there?! I’ll have a stab at this one!
      For point 1: Gravity does have an effect on time but it’s pretty tiny. If you’re into this there’s more info here.
      http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2010/feb/17/gravitys-effect-on-time-confirmed
      Looks like it has some practical uses such as making more accurate GPS satellites but don’t ask me to explain it in any more detail.
      For point 2, this is called eternalism and there’s a good explanation of it on wikipedia here.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternalism_%28philosophy_of_time%29
      This seems to be more theoretical and I’m not sure if we can prove it or not.

      Which film was this in coca-cola?

    • Photo: Angela Stokes

      Angela Stokes answered on 21 Nov 2014:

      Glad you took that one Robert! Deep thinking question there coca cola!

    • Photo: Sarah Harris

      Sarah Harris answered on 21 Nov 2014:

      Did you watch Interstellar by any chance? I watched that last week and was fascinated by the different theories – I’m not a physicist or astronomer so wasn’t sure what was true or not either!

      There have been quite a few articles explaining the theories behind Interstellar – this one on buzzfeed is pretty fab and straight forward http://www.buzzfeed.com/astrokatie/things-that-happen-in-interstellar-ranked-by-science

      From that it looks like gravity can affect the perception of time (although maybe not that such an extreme extent) but that the time-travel bit is pretty unlikely to be true.

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