 |
Albert Einstein, 1921 |
While many first-time visitors to Bhutan are quick to point out the slower pace of life in the Himalayan Kingdom compared to their native countries, not many are aware that there's a pure scientific explanation for the "Bhutanese time" phenomenon: According to Einstein's general theory of relativity, the farther a clock is from the centre of the earth, the slower it ticks (this is called
Gravitational time dilation). So it makes perfect sense for time to move more slowly up here in the Himalayas...
And now scientists at
NIST have been able to measure this difference when they placed two clocks just 13 inches apart. Pretty amazing. Here's the
full article.