I AM not sure I am supposed to confess to this in public, but I am an avid watcher of the British soap opera Emmerdale. It is available to me in the US via a streaming service, and I look forward to watching each day鈥檚 episode, especially on Thursdays when we get a longer one. The writers are so good at keeping the drama high, and no one actually gets hurt, unlike on reality TV.
Part of how they achieve this high drama is by using timescales that make no sense. For example, a man can cheat on his wife and have a baby with another woman, profess his love for his wife and then the next day be deeply in love with the mistress and totally over the wife, and it looks like maybe only 24 hours or so have passed. Meanwhile, days have gone by in other characters鈥� lives.
Which is to say that, in the Emmerdale universe, time is relative. Given that soap operas tend to run on what we might colloquially call 鈥渟ketchy鈥� notions of the flow of time, maybe avid soap viewers are well-primed to understand fundamental concepts inherent to special relativity and general relativity.
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The way time is distorted between different storylines reminds me of the difference between the flow of time near a black hole and far away from it. People who have seen the film Interstellar will be familiar with this. At one point in that film, astronauts travel to the surface of a planet where there is strong gravity, in effect because it is near a black hole. When they return to their ship, what felt like an hour to them has been years for their colleague who stayed on the ship.
This is an extreme example of time dilation, in which time appears to flow differently for people experiencing acceleration differently, for example in gravitational fields with differing strengths. This is a real physical phenomenon and not a figment of director Christopher Nolan鈥檚 imagination.
It even happens here on Earth: clocks at high altitudes will measure time slightly differently to those at sea level. At sea level, the clocks will go slower because they are experiencing stronger gravity than those in the mountains. This is something that has been tested. In 2018, a German team compared the ticking of time on a clock they placed in the French Alps with the ticking of time on a clock in Turin, Italy. Their measurements confirmed that gravitational time dilation did occur, and it was consistent with what the equations predict.
The experiments work out this way because, unlike old notions where space and time are both absolute, the only phenomenon that is absolute about our reality is a combined space-time. Separate measurements of space and time may vary depending on who is making the measurement and how they are moving, but differences between events in a combined sense of space-time are absolute. That is wild, you might find yourself thinking. But if you spend regular time in the unified Emmerdale space-time, maybe you are used to it!
Of course, there are limits to this analogy. In Emmerdale, in principle all the storylines are running on the same timeline and there are no extraordinary landscape changes that would produce time dilation in the show. In practice, I think what is actually happening is that they have a carefully choreographed schedule of who appears on camera when, and for how long. It is an impressive feat that leads to stories being told to the viewer in a specific order that respects the workload and schedules of the actors and production team.
I have plenty of respect for the work people put into the series. Nonetheless, it leads to outcomes that can feel a bit silly 鈥� a bit soapy, if you will. A man has time to win back the affections of his estranged wife, be diagnosed with an aneurysm, be accused of theft and die 鈥� all while his infant doesn鈥檛 grow at all. It isn鈥檛 like real life! But maybe it is actually useful for audiences, because it normalises time flowing differently in varied settings 鈥� in divergent frames of reference, as we might say in physics.
This has me wondering about the repeated suggestions in science writing for the general public that it isn鈥檛 possible for people to have any intuition for relativity until they have spent a lot of time with it. I tend to be sceptical about universalist claims about intuition. Readers of my , know I think intuition can be social. For example, non-binary people might have an easier time understanding wave-particle duality in quantum mechanics than people who feel comfortably ensconced in the gender binary.
Intuition isn鈥檛 a substitute for working out the maths if you are aiming for a deeply technical understanding, but we often rely on notions of it to help people get a sense of what the maths is telling us.
Chanda鈥檚 week
What I鈥檓 reading
Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa鈥檚 Pulitzer prize-winning book His Name Is George Floyd: One man鈥檚 life and the struggle for racial justice.
What I鈥檓 watching
In addition to Emmerdale, I enjoy Coronation Street from time to time.
What I鈥檓 working on
I鈥檝e been thinking deeply about how we define the concept of space-time.
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is an associate professor of physics and astronomy, and a core faculty member in women鈥檚 studies at the University of New Hampshire. Her research in theoretical physics focuses on cosmology, neutron stars and particles beyond the standard model
