I watched Interstellar again and there’s still something I don’t get. How did Cooper barely age while the people on Earth became so much older? I know it has to do with space and gravity or something, but thats that.
This might sound like a stupid question to some, but I genuinely find the concept fascinating and would be grateful if someone could explain it to me?
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The simplest explanation is that the laws of physics don’t apply in or near black holes, they make note of this a lot in the movie.
It’s time dilation. This thread explains it pretty well.
It’s because Cooper spent that time deep in the gravity well of a supermassive black hole. According to Einstein time actually flows more slowly in the presence of gravity, in the presence of very strong gravity the difference can be very large, but we have seen this experimentally in real life. Time passes a tiny amount more quickly for a satellite in orbit around the earth than it does at the Earth’s surface.
They explain it pretty clearly but- it’s as simple as 1 day (not sure of the exact times ) in space in that gravitational pull = 1 year on earth.