Aging Faster

Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity states, the ‘higher you live, the faster you age’, has been proved to be truthful by scientists from the US National Institute of Standards and Technology. The task was achieved by creating an atomic clock which is accurate enough to measure billionths of a second.

The Theory suggests that time and space aren’t constant and the only constant is the speed of light. Meaning, the faster you travel or the higher you are, the time around you slows down and vice versa. The researchers positioned two of the atomic clocks just a foot apart from each other at a height above sea level and found that the gravitational pull at the different altitudes affected the time and thus the clock at the top was faster than the one at the bottom.

The clocks used in the study are based on the tiny vibrations of aluminium atoms trapped in an electric field. The vibrations are in the same frequency as that of ultraviolet light, which can be detected by lasers, therefore making the clocks optical and precise, enabling them to fathom the dilation of time with the height change.