How to Use time dilation in a Sentence

time dilation

noun
  • The way that works is through time dilation.
    — Jeff Spry, Space.com, 12 Dec. 2025
  • The time dilation aspect was one of the first things that came to us.
    — John Benson, cleveland, 12 June 2022
  • This bending of space-time avoids the perils of time dilation.
    — Kyle Hill, Discover Magazine, 31 May 2013
  • However, each four-minute trip equals four years on their space colony due to the effects of time dilation.
    — Ariana Garcia, Chron, 17 June 2022
  • Anders tells the men who follow her that if something fails, no one will follow them because of the time dilation.
    — Dalene Rovenstine, EW.com, 18 June 2020
  • Researchers have confirmed that the effects of time dilation are present in the very early universe.
    — Jackie Appel, Popular Mechanics, 6 July 2023
  • Due to time dilation, those messages could reveal the entire sweep of future history.
    — WIRED, 28 Nov. 2020
  • Today’s topic was time dilation.
    — Bennett Durando, Denver Post, 18 Apr. 2026
  • This slowing down of time due to travel, which is known as time dilation, has been verified through multiple experiments.
    — Kat Friedrich, Popular Mechanics, 25 July 2023
  • All the matter that fell in after the astronaut over millions of years would come crashing down on them in less than a second because of the extreme time dilation effects.
    — Jennifer Ouellette, Ars Technica, 12 Oct. 2020
  • Though the effect is far too small to be noticeable to humans, this idea of quantum time dilation could have repercussions for high-precision quantum clocks.
    — Jonathan O'Callaghan, Scientific American, 23 Oct. 2020
  • In one such experiment, the lifetime of muon decay verifies the existence of time dilation.
    — Ronald C. Lasky, Scientific American, 24 Oct. 2014
  • There is a phenomenon of relativity known as time dilation, in which time appears to slow down almost to a stop for bodies that approach the speed of light.
    — Jerry Adler, Newsweek, 14 Mar. 2018
  • His mental models predicted time dilation, gravitational lensing, and the speed of light.
    — Shai Tubali, Big Think, 5 Aug. 2025
  • Back on Earth, Eyehategod’s music at least feels like a metaphor for gravitational time dilation.
    — Washington Post, 12 Mar. 2021
  • Fascinatingly, relativistic effects, such as time dilation and length contraction, start to happen when speeds exceed one-tenth the speed of light.
    — Isaac Schultz / Gizmodo, Quartz, 2 Apr. 2024
  • This effect, called time dilation, would be especially pronounced for the Hail Mary, which is moving at more than 90 percent of the speed of light.
    — Encyclopedia Britannica, 23 Mar. 2026
  • Here’s a rundown of some of the big news from the first 24 hours of the meeting which, due to some weird kind of relativistic time dilation, represents about a week for our intrepid reporters.
    — Adam Feuerstein , Matthew Herper, STAT, 1 June 2024
  • This time dilation gives the Doctor the chance to spend 17 years (or just over a week, depending on your point of view) giving SAM a childhood.
    — Richard Edwards, Space.com, 26 Feb. 2026
  • Because of a phenomenon called cosmological time dilation, due to the expansion of the universe, the crash will seem to take place in 21 years from our point of view on Earth.
    — Clara Moskowitz, Scientific American, 22 May 2015
  • High-energy muons traveling at near–light-speed endure longer, for milliseconds, because of the time dilation predicted by Einstein’s theory of relativity.
    — Byadrian Cho, science.org, 28 Mar. 2024
  • To illustrate the effect of time dilation, Einstein proposed an example—the twin paradox—that is arguably the most famous thought experiment in relativity theory.
    — Ronald C. Lasky, Scientific American, 24 Oct. 2014
  • And because of the time dilation effects in Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity, known as general relativity, 1 year passing on such a planet would see thousands of years go by around an ordinary star.
    — Daniel Clery, Science | AAAS, 4 Feb. 2020
  • The contribution upended understandings of gravity, space and time, opening up explorations of gravitational time dilation, light deflection and gravitational waves.
    — Claire Parker, Anchorage Daily News, 23 Nov. 2021
  • Similarly, gravitational time dilation, the bending of light by large masses, and the precession of everything from planetary orbits to rotating spheres sent up to space has demonstrated spectacular agreement with Einstein’s predictions.
    — Ethan Siegel, Forbes, 25 May 2021
  • Nothing is particularly egregious about Angus MacLane’s film, which tosses its bulbous-jawed hero into a narrative of planet colonization and time dilation that feels a little like diet Interstellar.
    — David Sims, The Atlantic, 16 June 2022

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'time dilation.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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