Page 141 - Matter: The Other Name for Illusion

times the sun rose and set. For example, we calculate that we have spent three
days in the room. But if the person who put us in the room comes and says that
we were actually in the room for two days, that the sun we saw in the window
was actually artificially produced, and that the clock in the room was fast, then

our calculations would make no sense.
This example shows that our knowledge about the rate at which time
passes depends on references which change according to the person who is
perceiving it.
This is an example of how under different circumstances a person
perceives the same amount of time as longer or shorter. Here is another
example. For a person who is waiting for his brother to come out of an

operation, one hour seems like several. But if the same person is doing
something he really enjoys, he cannot understand how the hour passed so
quickly.
Einstein scientifically established the following fact in his "General Theory
of Relativity": The rate at which time passes changes according to the speed of
a body and its distance from the center of gravity. If the speed increases, time
decreases, contracts, moves slower and seems that the point of inertia
approaches.
Let us explain this with one of Einstein's thought experiments. Suppose

that there are two twin brothers. One of them stays in this world, the other goes
on a space journey during which he travels almost at the speed of light. When
he returns from space, he will find that his twin brother is much older than he
is. The reason for this is that the time passed much more slowly for the brother
who went on the space trip. The same example can be thought of in relation to
a father who went on a space trip in a rocket traveling at nearly 99 percent of
the speed of time and his son who remained on this earth. According to

Einstein, if the father was 27 years old and his son was three, 30 earth-years
later when the father returned to earth, the son would be 33 and the father
would be 30 years old. 44
The relativity of time is not something that is relative to the speeding up or
slowing down of the clock; it comes from the fact that every material system, to
the particles at the subatomic level, works at different rates of speed. In an
environment where time was slowed down, a person's heartbeat, rate of cell
division and brain activity would happen more slowly. In this situation, a
person would go about his daily business unaware that time had slowed down.

Time is a Perception Too 139