Relativity: A Matter of Overtime

On his triumphant tour of Europe last month, Apollo 8 Astronaut Frank Borman amused his audiences by insisting that he, James Lovell and William Anders were older than they would have been had they not flown to the moon. "I think we should get overtime for that," he complained. Borman was joking about his pay, but he was quite serious about his aging. During their moon mission, the astronauts aged about 300 microseconds (300 millionths of a second) more than the people they left behind on earth.

Borman was informed of his overtime by University of Maryland Physicist Carroll Alley...

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