Question: The time compression is related to the person's mood? Or is that related to physical science? :)

Hi Adriana,

Do you maybe mean the theory of relativity? the one created by Einstein? many people think it is about mood, so when you are having fun time passes really quickly (time flies), but if you are waiting on something time goes really slowly. This however has nothing to do with the theory of relativity, which is indeed more related to physical science, but i can try to explain it to you briefly.

It all starts from the fact that light always has the same speed. and with always i mean always, and that has strange implications. For example. if you throw a ball when standing still, or when you throw a ball out of a train moving 120 kms/h, you can imagine that the ball from the train will go a lot faster than the one you throw while standing still. However it depends how you look at it. Because if i throw a ball through a train while standing in it, it doesn’t seem to go so fast, but if someone else sees this train passing by and sees me throwing the ball through the train. To him it seems like the ball is going very fast! So the speed of the ball is RELATIVE to the one who observes it. This is why it is called the theory of relativity 🙂
The strange thing with light is that in all the examples above if you would turn on a flashlight instead of throw a ball and you would measure the speed of that light everyone would measure the same speed. So whether you do that standing still, or are inside the train, or see it coming by, the light always goes with the same speed! do you see the difference with the ball?

This gave a lot of headaches to scientist around 1900 and Einstein solved it. He said that if things go with a very high speed, at the speed of light or close to it, the time for that thing goes slower than for other things that stand still or go slow. To explain exactly why is a bit too complicated to do here, but it has amazing implications. It means for example, that if you move with a very fast rocket, your time goes slower and you’ll get older slower, RELATIVE to the ones standing still. So if you are by yourself in that rocket you don’t notice it but if you get back to earth you will see that everyone got older much faster than you! Have you watched the movie interstellar? because there you see it happening!

It is really hard to explain something this complex in a few lines, but i hope you get a bit of an idea what this theory of relativity is about. If anything is unclear please let me know. And…if this was not at all and answer to your question, than please let us know as well 🙂