@dharmaj – this one is specifically for you.
There was a widely held belief in ancient India (it still is believed by some) that one moment in heaven is equal to many earth years. Although this surprised me as a child, I now know that this is quite possible.
As wonderful as the possibility of this fact is the fact that this was known to ancient Indians. But since there is no ancient Indian text containing the theory of relativity, it is extremely likely that our ancestors did not understand the phenomena, but merely knew it. Now the belief is most likely based on the legend of an Indian emperor who left for heaven while he was still alive to help the Gods in a celestial battle against the devils and returned only to find that more than a century had passed on earth. This can mean two things, as I have reasoned below.
The dilation could have been caused courtesy his speed and the (apparently) large distance between heaven and earth. Something similar to what happens in the twin’s paradox. This would imply that heaven is just an ordinary planet like the earth.
An alternative explanation is that the dilation occurred mainly due to a specialty of heaven rather than the travel. The specialty is, of course, that the gravity in heaven is very large, either due to its own parameters (mass, radius) or due to its proximity to a high gravity celestial body, e.g., a black hole, a neutron star.
The second explanation makes our ancestral belief true but the first, which, personally, I consider more probable, indicates that our ancestors were not so smart after all. They were just lucky to know a fact that would take millenniums to be proved. In that case, how the emperor managed to make the trip is a different story altogether.
@dharmaj again – i came across this music video recently. try it out.
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