Hands off, Einstein, she's mine!

My experiment with a pretty girl. Hands off, Einstein!

Last week I posed the question if I kiss my beautiful wife for a minute and for her it seems like an hour, does that make me a good lover?

The results are in. (Don’t worry – this remains a post relating to time travel! 😉 )

Time dilation from kissing.
Image credit: Prashant Soni

My wife feels pretty much the same as I do, i.e. when she kisses me for a minute it seems like a second.

This has interesting ramifications – and not just for my pride! 😉

If we’re both kissing for a minute and each perceive it to last a second, two questions are raised:

Where has all the time gone?

Our bodies are tangled in real time for a minute, so somewhere 59 seconds remain unaccounted for. Where has that time gone?

The obvious answer is that love clouds the brain and as a result we simply think slower and subsequently perceive time differently. Amorous or amorphous? So let’s be a little more scientific; let’s talk time dilation.

Did the Earth move bringing a change in the reference frame? Or were we swept off our feet taking us to a lower gravitational potential? I’ll say yes on both counts, and the time as experienced by us and that experienced by external observers (which I hasten to point out that there were none – despite living in Holland!) differed.

But how does it stand for the passage of time within the ‘experiment’?

The original postulation was that time passes at differing rates for the (willing) kisser and the (perhaps not so willing) kissee. But it turns out that my wife feels the same as I, i.e. that she suspects that during her minute of kissing, an hour has passed for me.

So question 2…

Have we stumbled on the twin paradox?

If both of us feel that for us time is passing more quickly than for the other, have we bumped into a kind of reverse twin paradox?

The twin paradox is where one twin zooms off at high speed and comes back to find that he’s aged less than his Earth bound brother. The paradox arises (though disputed by some experts on wikipedia) that the laws of sibling rivalry mean that the brothers argue, in this case about who has moved relative to who and thus which one of the two has aged less.

The parallel with my wife is that we argue which one of us is experiencing the second and which one experiences the hour.

Well. There are ways to make up with your wife after an argument! 😉

One possible explanation for the paradox is that the traveling twin accelerated away from the other, had a change of mind and slowed down to a stop, turned round, and came back home again. Or in other words, there was a change in the reference framework and special relativity no longer holds. i.e. the twins are identical in looks, but not in experience. They are different from each other. (Obviously; one’s into space travel and the other one wants to sit at home writing up his blog). I still suspect that if the twins were truly identical in all respects, and experienced identical circumstances, the paradox would remain.

Conclusion

So the mindset needs to be the same. But bringing this back to my wifey, if we are both feeling the same way then there is a very real risk that universe will shake itself apart because nature abhors paradoxes.

At the same time – and I can’t stress this strongly enough – kissing my wife without consent is a highly dangerous activity. Universes have heaved under the strain of the knowledge, black holes have collapsed, and supernovae have extinguished themselves and hidden themselves under a safe rock.

There we have it. Kissing with consent in the time2timetravel HQ makes the universe a safer (and much happier) place!

QED.

Paul

safer universe
Image credit: Marc Garrido I Puig

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