Earth’s Core Is Younger Than We Thought

Without a Tardis , a journeying to the center of the Earth might be your full choice for traveling to the past tense . Because of the direction gravity warps spacetime , physicists have now calculated that the Earth ’s core is 2.5 eld immature than its surface .

This stand for a much more significanttime dilationeffect than anybody realized . During a lecture at Caltech in the sixties , the esteemed Richard Feynman first betoken out that the center of the Earth would be younger than the surface , owing to a fascinating issue of Einstein ’s general theory of relativity : clocks prevail more slowly when pose closer to a heavy gravitational mass .

But Feynman said that the center of the Earth would be “ a day or two younger , ” than the control surface . And patently , nobody ever bothered to check the math . Like an internet meme gone so viral that pol name it with overconfidence , that “ day or two young ” figure was repeated in public lecture and textbooks the public over .

Argentina’s President Javier Milei (left) and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., holding a chainsaw in a photo posted to Kennedy’s X account on May 27. 2025.

Now , a squad of Danish physicists has perform a simple back - of - the - envelope figuring that advise the true age difference between the nucleus and the open is approximately two and a half years ( owing to physics alone and neglecting geologic processes ) . The computing , they explicate in apaperpublished in the European Journal of Physics , was not signify to besmirch Feynman ’s reputation , but rather to point out that many number scientist take as fact have murky origins , and really ought to be re - verified from time to time :

Scientists must to a declamatory extent rely on the validation of other fellow ’s study , and it happen to be a psychological default term among many ( scientists ) , that if a famous peer has publically announce a result , it is live with at cheek value . This seems also to be the situation in the sheath of the blemished estimate of the relativistic age of the Earth ’s meat .

As for the new deliberation , the writer indicate that Feynman — who splendidly trusted nobody ’s math but his own — would have been happy to see the error corrected .

William Duplessie