I get that heavy gravitational pulls would make time differ but what I don’t get is if someone would age differently to this further away?! If I was to get a near a black hole then return to Earth how and why would people be older than I am. Wouldn’t I be exactly the same but the time around me whilst around the black hole would have slowed but not my aging?
[Physics] If time slows near a black hole how does someone age differently back on Earth
black-holestime-dilation
Best Answer
If the "time around" things (and people) was slowing down while the things themselves still age in the same way, then what would the idea that "time slows down" even mean?
Actually the only way it makes sense to say that time slows down is precisely when two objects depart then meet again and it appears that both objects did not experience the same lapse of time during their separation. Then one could say that time slowed down for one of the objects, but it is not a very appropriate manner to express what happens, because it misses the relative aspect. For any specific person or object on its own, time never slows down at all.
Maybe the most important point is that time is not "around": it is not a container or an element with a spatial extent. It is an abstraction allowing to compare the evolution (aging) of systems. Because in our experience when we compare evolutions such as the ways clocks tick the positions and speeds of the clocks do not matter, we have built a mental image of time as something that flows uniformly in the background, so to say. But physics tells us otherwise, and in fact speeds (and positions in a gravitational context) do matter if we want to make proper and accurate comparisons.