Re: opposite of relativistic time contraction

Bryan Derksen wrote:

> Ben Crowell wrote:
>> Suppose we have an intelligent species with control over godlike
amounts
>> of matter and energy. They can make black holes from scratch, for
>> instance. Now let's say they want to make time flow more rapidly
>> for a certain observer than for the observers out in flattish
spacetime.
> 
> It probably wouldn't be useful to these aliens, but I recall reading a 
> while back that to a hypothetical observer who's out in the middle of a 
> galactic supervoid will have had a significant amount of extra time pass

> since the beginning of the universe due to the absence of gravitational 
> effects from nearby matter.
> 
> Kind of freaky to think that somewhere out there is a place where the 
> universe is already 18 billion years old, or whatever the specific 
> number was. Modulo the usual caveats about simultaneity and so forth. :)

This doesn't sound right to me.  Remember that geodesic gravitational 
time dilations are actually very minor effects; the maximal time 
dilation effect you can get from orbiting close to a black hole is only 
about a factor of two.

It seems to me that any such "inverse" time dilation you'd get from 
being very, very far away from any mass in intergalactic space would be 
very marginal.

-- 
Erik Max Francis && max@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 && http://www.alcyone.com/max/
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