/sci/ - Science & Math

>>9475904
Let's say I make a computer game like The Sims. Let's call it "The Tims". There are 4 neighborhoods with different Tims characters in them. My game allocates 25 % of CPU power to each neighborhood. The game has no time, everything that happens, simply happens because there was a cause that made it happen. The Tims is like a huge clockwork, Tims are simply doing stuff because of long chains of causes and effects. Like dominoes.

Three of the neighbourhoods have their Tims sleeping while 1 neighborhood has its character swimming in a swimming pool. Physics engine uses considerably more resources in that one neighborhood while simulating all that water splashing around. But that neighborhood still only gets the same 25 % of CPU resources as all the others do. Frames per second drops to half in that one neighborhood. After a while we see that the swimmer's clock is lagging in comparison. The swimmer calls this time dilation even though there is no time, there are just more to calculations to be done with the same amount of CPU resources given.

And that's why black holes and other mass concentrations (and all energy) makes "time go slower". There's more stuff happening (more particles or energetic interactions) compared to places where there's less stuff.