Essay on "How will 2020 change 2021"
Word limit 350-400 words
Answers
Answer:
how does time work?
Explanation:
We conventionally think of time as something simple and fundamental. It flows uniformly, independent of everything else, from the past to the future, measured by clocks and watches. In the course of time, the events of the universe succeed each other in an orderly way: pasts, presents, futures. The past is fixed, the future open ... and yet all of this has turned out to be false.
One after another, the characteristic features of time have proved to be approximations, mistakes determined by our perspective, just like the flatness of Earth or the revolving of the sun. The growth of our knowledge has led to a slow disintegration of our notion of time.
What we call “time” is a complex collection of structures, of layers. Under increasing scrutiny, in ever-greater depth, time has lost layers one after another, piece by piece.
The Elasticity of Time
Let’s begin with a simple fact: Time passes faster in the mountains than it does at sea level.
The difference is small, but it can be measured with precision timepieces that you can buy on the internet for a few thousand dollars. With practice, anyone can witness the slowing down of time. With the timepieces of specialized laboratories, researchers can detect this slowing down of time between levels just a few centimeters apart: A clock on the floor runs a little more slowly than one on a table.
It is not just the clocks that slow down: Lower down, all processes are slower. Two friends separate, with one of them living in the plains and the other going to live in the mountains. They meet up again years later. The one who has stayed down has lived less, aged less, the mechanism of his cuckoo clock has oscillated fewer times. He has had less time to do things, his plants have grown less, his thoughts have had less time to unfold. Lower down, there is simply less time than at an altitude.
Is this surprising? Perhaps it is. But this is how the world works. Time passes more slowly in some places, more rapidly in others.
The surprising thing, perhaps, is that someone understood this slowing down of time a century before we had clocks precise enough to measure it. His name, of course, was Albert Einstein.
The ability to understand something before it’s observed is at the heart of scientific thinking. In antiquity, the Greek philosopher Anaximander understood that the sky continues beneath our feet long before ships had circumnavigated the Earth. At the beginning of the modern era, the Polish mathematician and astronomer Copernicus understood the Earth turns long before astronauts had seen it do so from the moon.
In the course of making such strides, we learn the things that seemed self-evident to us were really no more than prejudices. It seemed obvious the sky was above us and not below; otherwise, the Earth would fall down. It seemed self-evident the Earth did not move; otherwise, it would cause everything to crash. That time passed at the same speed everywhere seemed equally obvious to us. But just as children grow up and discover the world is not as it seemed from within the four walls of their homes, humankind as a whole does the same.
Falling Objects
Einstein asked himself a question that has perhaps puzzled many of us when studying the force of gravity: How can the sun and Earth “attract” each other without touching and without utilizing anything between them?
He looked for a plausible explanation and found one by imagining the sun and the Earth do not attract each other directly. Instead, each of the two gradually acts on that which is between them — space and time — modifying them just as someone immersed in water displaces the liquid around them. This modification of the structure of time influences the movement of bodies, causing them to “fall” or gravitate toward each other.