Epigraph:

The angels and the Spirit ascend to Him in a day the measure of which is fifty thousand years. (Al Quran 70:4)

He will plan the Divine Ordinance from the heaven unto the earth, then shall it go up to Him in a day the duration of which is a thousand years according to what you reckon. (Al Quran 32:5)

Presented by Zia H Shah MD with the help of ChatGPT

Introduction: Time does not march at a fixed universal pace. Over a century ago, Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity revealed that time is elastic – it can stretch or compress depending on speed and gravity. In everyday life we don’t notice this flexibility, but in extreme environments the effects become dramatic. Einstein predicted that clocks in a strong gravitational field tick slower than clocks in weaker gravity science.nasa.gov. This effect, known as gravitational time dilation, has been measured on Earth: for example, clocks on airplanes tick slightly faster than those on the ground because they are farther from Earth’s gravity, and astronauts aboard the International Space Station age just a tiny bit quicker than people on Earth science.nasa.gov. These differences are only microseconds, but they confirm a profound truth – gravity warps time itself. Nowhere is this effect more extreme than around black holes, the universe’s most powerful gravitational traps.

Black holes are regions where gravity is so intense that not even light can escape once it gets too close. The boundary beyond which nothing returns is called the event horizon, aptly nicknamed the “point of no return.” It is essentially the invisible spherical border of the black hole; if an object crosses this boundary, it cannot come back out because it would need to travel faster than light to do so science.nasa.gov. Near this boundary, space and time are warped to an incredible degree. Here, in the black hole’s shadow, time itself slows to a crawl (at least from an outside point of view) – a phenomenon that pushes Einstein’s relativistic predictions to their limit.

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