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6 months ago in Cosmology By Shreya K

Is time dilation related to the universe speeding up?

Time slows down when you move fast. The universe's expansion is accelerating. Are these two phenomena connected?

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By Suresh Answered 2 months ago

They're both relativistic, but they're different kinds of effects. Time dilation is local: your clock ticks slower because of your velocity or proximity to a massive object. Accelerated expansion is global: it's a property of spacetime itself, baked into the Friedmann equations. Cosmological redshift does involve a stretching of time across vast distances, but that's an integrated effect over the universe's history, not the same as Lorentz time dilation. Related math, different physics.

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