B Relativity and Biological Aging: How Time Dilation Slows Cell Activity

[faz19_]

TL;DR Summary

This is a hypothesis exploring how gravitational time dilation might slow down the aging process by affecting key biological functions like ATP production, ion exchange, and DNA replication. I’m not claiming any discovery—just trying to understand the exact mechanisms behind how time dilation influences biological aging.

Hello everyone! I’m a student with a deep interest in physics, and recently I developed a conceptual hypothesis that I haven’t seen addressed directly in scientific literature. It's something that ive personally searched at a lot of places for many years. Reddit, Stackexchange, YT videos but havent gotten the answer to. I'd really appreciate feedback from those with experience in relativity, biophysics, or theoretical biology.

We know from general relativity that time passes more slowly in stronger gravitational fields such as black holes. This is well confirmed experimentally (e.g., atomic clocks on satellites or planes). It's also often mentioned in passing that “astronauts age slightly slower” due to these effects.

My question is:

Could this time dilation mechanistically slow down specific biological processes — like ATP production, ion exchange, DNA replication, or protein folding — which are based on physical and chemical interactions?

[Mentors' note:
No, because the question is based on a misconception of what time dilation is. Posts below seek to correct the misunderstanding and explain why there is no "slowing down" of biological processes to explain.

Speculations about possible explanations, all based on this misconception, have been edited out of the post, but we are leaving it visible because it has attracted a number of good answers.]

 

[Ibix]

Time dilation affects all clocks. Biological processes are imprecise clocks, but they are clocks. They would run at the same rate as any other clock co-located with them, which remote observers might measure to be time dilated. This would occur in gravitational fields or in relative motion. Thus your wristwatch would always appear to you to tick at one second per second as normal if you were close to a black hole. Distant observers would say both the watch and your biological processes were running slow by the same factor when compared to their own clocks.

 

[faz19_]

Time dilation affects all clocks. Biological processes are imprecise clocks, but they are clocks. They would run at the same rate as any other clock co-located with them, which remote observers might measure to be time dilated. This would occur in gravitational fields or in relative motion. Thus your wristwatch would always appear to you to tick at one second per second as normal if you were close to a black hole. Distant observers would say both the watch and your biological processes were running slow by the same factor when compared to their own clocks.

Thank you for your response! See, i get what youre saying. But what I’m really trying to is digging into how those biological processes physically slow down on a cellular level due to the massive force of gravity? like how those cellular functions (responsible for aging) might be stretched out in time, not just the abstract idea that "all clocks slow down"


In other words, I’m trying to bridge the gap between the physics of time dilation and the biochemistry of aging by proposing that the very physical interactions inside cells are subject to the same relativistic effects. Would love your thoughts on whether that mechanistic approach makes sense?

 

[Dale]

Thank you for your response! See, i get what youre saying. But what I’m really trying to is digging into how those biological processes physically slow down on a cellular level due to the massive force of gravity? like how those cellular functions (responsible for aging) might be stretched out in time, not just the abstract idea that "all clocks slow down"


In other words, I’m trying to bridge the gap between the physics of time dilation and the biochemistry of aging by proposing that the very physical interactions inside cells are subject to the same relativistic effects. Would love your thoughts on whether that mechanistic approach makes sense?

Time dilation affects the electromagnetic force, the strong nuclear force, and the weak nuclear force. And of course gravitational time dilation is also measurable.

Biology doesn't involve a 5th force. Everything in biology is based on one or more of those forces (mostly electromagnetism). So what is left to show mechanistically? Every possible mechanism is already tested. It isn't that a mechanistic approach is wrong, it is just already done.

 

[Ibix]

There isn't a mechanistic explanation, and nothing really slows down.

It turns out that the elapsed time you measure corresponds to the "length" of the path you followed through spacetime. When you have time dilation and related phenomena like differential aging all that has happened is that one clock took a "shorter" route from the time we call "now" to the time we call "one second later". I've put some scare quotes in there because there are some important differences between distance through space and "distance" through spacetime, but there are a lot of similarities - in particular, the relevant thing here is that trying to answer why a clock is time dilated is a bit like asking why one route from A to B is longer than another. There isn't really a useful answer.

With regard to specific biological processes, I think what you are doing is effectively replacing "time dilation causes remote observers to measure you aging slowly" with "time dilatiom causes remote obsevers to measure the detailed processes we collectively call aging to run slowly". It's certainly true, but I don't think it adds any insight because you're just replacing one crude clock with a collection of crude clocks, all of which relativity says behave the same way.

 

[faz19_]

There isn't a mechanistic explanation, and nothing really slows down.

It turns out that the elapsed time you measure corresponds to the "length" of the path you followed through spacetime. When you have time dilation and related phenomena like differential aging all that has happened is that one clock took a "shorter" route from the time we call "now" to the time we call "one second later". I've put some scare quotes in there because there are some important differences between distance through space and "distance" through spacetime, but there are a lot of similarities - in particular, the relevant thing here is that trying to answer why a clock is time dilated is a bit like asking why one route from A to B is longer than another. There isn't really a useful answer.

With regard to specific biological processes, I think what you are doing is effectively replacing "time dilation causes remote observers to measure you aging slowly" with "time dilatiom causes remote obsevers to measure the detailed processes we collectively call aging to run slowly". It's certainly true, but I don't think it adds any insight because you're just replacing one crude clock with a collection of crude clocks, all of which relativity says behave the same way.

So I get what you're saying ,that from a relativity standpoint, all clocks (whether simple or biological) just “tick” slower because of the path they take through spacetime, and that’s the whole point of time dilation.

But the thing is, I’m not trying to restate or reword that. I’m actually trying to explore why the biological clock ticks slower, like, what specifically is slowing down inside the body. Why would one person whos at the edge of blackhole age considerably slower than a person thats on earth. And thats my proposal of a conceptual link and mechanism between time dilation near a black hole with biology

 

[Dale]

I’m actually trying to explore why the biological clock ticks slower, like, what specifically is slowing down inside the body.

Do you think time somehow bounces off of a biological organism? If not, if time passes inside a biological body, then "time slows down" seems like a sufficient why and what.

 

[Ibix]

explore why the biological clock ticks slower, like, what specifically is slowing down inside the body.

As measured from a distance, everything. As measured locally, nothing. That's the whole point. Every single process that can be used as a clock slows down (or not, depending on who is doing the measuring), all the way down to the time take for individual chemical reactions between individual molecules.

 

[Ibix]

Fundamentally, that's why it's called time dilation. It's about clocks working in the same way but measuring different "distances", not about clocks working in different ways.

You can certainly break a complex and messy clock like a human down into simpler parts, and you can certainly check how each of those parts behave. You could even (in principle) model individual molecular clocks, but it doesn't add any insight. They're not simple ballistic mechanisms like a light clock where you can leverage kinematics to derive the Lorentz transforms. You'd end up with a problem in quantum field theory on a curved background - and quantum field theory is built on top of relativity, so that is just a really complicated way of assuming the answer is consistent with relativity.

 

[russ_watters]

So I get what you're saying ,that from a relativity standpoint, all clocks (whether simple or biological) just “tick” slower because of the path they take through spacetime, and that’s the whole point of time dilation.

But the thing is, I’m not trying to restate or reword that. I’m actually trying to explore why the biological clock ticks slower, like, what specifically is slowing down inside the body. Why would one person whos at the edge of blackhole age considerably slower than a person thats on earth. And thats my proposal of a conceptual link and mechanism between time dilation near a black hole with biology

How is "the clock recorded less elapsed time because less time passed for the traveling clock and its human companion" not a complete answer to the question? There's no physical mechanism to be affected beyond that statement.

For example, hair grows a centimeter a month. My twin and I each shave our heads and then he blasts off in a fast spaceship, flies around a black hole that happened to be nearby and comes back to Earth a year later by my clock. My hair is now 12cm long. His clock says 6 months have elapsed, and his hair is 6cm long.

Further, we each took Polaroids at 1 month intervals, and they are identical: 1mo = 1 mo, 2 mo = 2 mo, etc.

What is there to explain?

 

[A.T.]

...what specifically is slowing down inside the body. ...

If "everything" doesn't answer your question, what answer do you expect?

If you want to bridge the gap between physics and biology, look at the chemistry: All chemical reactions run slower, if the information propagates slower in the fields via which the particles are interacting. And biology builds on that chemistry.

 

[Nugatory]

time passes more slowly

You’ll hear it described that way in non-serious introductions written for non-serious students, but that description is very misleading. (Yes, you’ll find similar wording in some proper textbooks as well, but they will also provide the mathematical treatment that clarifies what’s really going on. This might also be a good time to mention that “time dilation” isn’t the same thing as “time passes more slowly” - the latter phrase needs much additional context to useful).

It’s more accurate to say that time passes at the same rate, one second per second for everyone. Thus there’s no need to find a mechanism to explain faster or slower aging because there’s no such thing - one second passes, I’m one second older.

In the case of gravitational time dilation we have to be careful about what this “time dilation” really is. Say I’m deep inside a gravity well. My wristwatch ticks, and one second later it ticks again. We correctly say that the spacetime distance between tick one and tick two is one second. Naturally I age by one second between these two events. You, far outside the gravity well, are watching my wristwatch through a powerful telescope, and you observe the first tick. Then more than a second later you observe the second tick; the spacetime distance between the two observation events is more than one second. (You may worry about the time it takes for the light to travel from my watch, but that’s the same correction for both observations so cancels out when you’re calculating the time between them).
Crucially, we are comparing two different lengths here: the length between my tick one and tick two, and the length between your observation one and observation two. That’s two different lengths between two different endpoints, there’s no particular reason why they have to be the same.

 

[phinds]

@faz19_ you seriously are not thinking this through. You, right now as you read this, are MASSIVELY time dilated (relative to an accelerated particle in CERN). You are also, somewhat, time dilated relative to a fast moving asteroid in the solar system, and you are simultaneously "experiencing" minor time dilation relative to a jet plane overhead. You are, in other words, in an infinite number of degrees of time dilation. Do you feel slowed down? In particular, do you feel slowed down at an infinite number of different rates?

Time dilation is a coordinate effect, not physical reality at the local level (your body).

 

[Dale]

You can certainly break a complex and messy clock like a human down into simpler parts, and you can certainly check how each of those parts behave

And when you get down to the simplest parts you can write down the laws that govern those parts. And we have done those tests and shown that all of the laws that govern all of the simplest parts undergo time dilation equally and universally, as predicted by relativity.

 

[Nugatory]

This thread is closed as the underlying question has been addressed.