Physicists: Time is Actually Slowing Down

I now have the perfect excuse for being perpetually late. See, it's not my fault: some scientists now think that time is actually slowing down!

Professor Senovilla, and colleagues have proposed a mind-bending alternative. They propose that there is no such thing as dark energy at all, and we’re looking at things backwards. Senovilla proposes that we have been fooled into thinking the expansion of the universe is accelerating, when in reality, time itself is slowing down. At an everyday level, the change would not be perceptible. However, it would be obvious from cosmic scale measurements tracking the course of the universe over billions of years. The change would be infinitesimally slow from a human perspective, but in terms of the vast perspective of cosmology, the study of ancient light from suns that shone billions of years ago, it could easily be measured

The team's proposal, published in the journal Physical Review D, dismisses dark energy as fiction. Instead, Senovilla says, the appearance of acceleration is caused by time itself gradually slowing down, like a clock with a run-down battery.

Link - via The Presurfer


That's funny, because I think the opposite is happening: time has definitely started speeding up. I think it started right around the time I turned 17, because every year since then has gone by faster than the one before.
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lol,I completely agree with the comment above me. Time just seems to go faster and faster as you get older. I wonder if there is actually some biological reason for this? I.E as kids, how come we view everything as going t a glacial rate?

But related to this article, I think its an awesome hypothesis, we never even considered this before! I hope it gets more research done into it, it would certainly be a very new way of looking at things.
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*brain explodes*

Gotta be honest here, I like to think I am a pretty smart, rational guy. I hold advanced degrees, but these physics articles always scare the crap out of me. Time is slowing down? Particles are going to engulf the planet? Dogs and cats living together?

It's enough to make a guy want to become a born again Christian. Unless time is stopped there, too.
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for #1 & 2,
In first grade it took a whole 6th of your life to get through that year. Today it takes 1/[your age here] to get through a year. Hope this helps!

I always thought there had to be a simpler answer than using the "Oh, the dark stuff did it!" defense.
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This is odd - the expansion of the universe means that a given point is decreasingly influenced by distant gravity wells - and we know that proximity to gravity wells causes time to slow.

question: do the relativistic effects of gravity cancel if one is between 2 equally powerful wells? that is, in a binary system of mutually orbiting black holes, if one were to reside at the center of gravity between them, would one be ripped in half or feel no gravity at all? and if one felt no gravity at all, would one then experience zero time dilation? or is the effect cumulative?
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"Oops, something in your comment triggered Neatoramabot to request a moderation. Don't worry - someone will take a look at it soon! Please do not re-submit the comment. "

"cumulative"?
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Foreigner is correct. Observable time is only relative to the observer. So what I perceive as time being fast could very well be time being slow for someone else. Like in empty space time is faster than when near a gravitational field.
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