• Question: Why do black holes actually bend time?

    Asked by to Anna, Elaine, Fiona, Kevin, Darren on 16 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Zhiming Darren Tan

      Zhiming Darren Tan answered on 16 Jun 2014:

      I think they bend light, in addition to causing lots of extreme effects. Primarily because they are so small and heavy.

    • Photo: Elaine Cloutman-Green

      Elaine Cloutman-Green answered on 19 Jun 2014:

      I had to get a friend to help me with this one. They have suggested:

      They don’t so much bend time as stretch it and there is a problem with considering time as being separate to space. They distort space-time and that is why time, relative to someone not deep in the gravity field, seems to go slowly there. However, any mass at all will distort space-time a bit. The speed of time (if I can call it that) is faster on top of a tall mountain than it is at sea level because the Earth has a pretty strong gravity field. However, all of this is relative. It all depends what you are comparing the time flow against and we tend to compare it against whatever time flow we happen to be in. There is no such thing as absolute time and that makes life very complicated. Please see Einstein’s theory of specific relativity for details.

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