This is not an explanation but it’s a way I like to visualize it
You accelerate to 99% the speed of light, and fly towards Jupiter
From your perspective, Jupiter suddenly gets a lot closer, and you travel only a short distance over the course of a few minutes.
You arrive, and stop, and turn back around to look, the distance is vast, and your friend tells you it took 2 hours.
Basically, from your perspective the distance you travel is shorter, and thus the time it takes to travel that distance is shorter.
You have to get somewhere a light-hour away, so you take one step forward at nearly the speed of light, and you’re already there, an hour later
Edit: I will also clarify that the numbers probably don’t scale in real life as what I described, and it’s no doubt much weirder than this
Edit 2: a more important clarification: space does not compress from an outside perspective, but when you are travelling are those speeds objects and the space between objects appear to become flattened in the axis of your movement. I believe outside observers will also see the traveller as being flattened, although I’m not sure about that. All this has to do with light only moving at the speed of light, leading to things looking wonky
I aint gonna lie, i might be wrong but this is how i was able to somewhat understand it.
Lets say you have friends on top of a hill and they're gonna watch you run around the track 50 times. They're gonna cheer for you all the way. In your realm you run around the track 50 times at the speed of light and it takes you one second. You finish and they clap and say yeah good job!!!!!!!! But to them they stood there for 4 hours and watched you run around the track 50 times. Its almost like there are two worlds that separate when you start moving that fast, but they sync up when you stop moving.
Its the same thing, but now you're going far far away in a spaceship. To you its gonna be quick. But to them they'll spend years waiting for you to come back.
If I'm wrong then I'm also fucked up in the head, and I join ya'll in trying to understand this concept. But this is the closest I've gotten in understanding the idea referenced above.
My brain doesn't wanna understand it lol. We are so so far away from ever being able to test everything out sigh maybe an AI will figure it out one day.
It is very confusing, I think the movie interestellar shows something similar, but the time is a different because of a black hole, >! it shows cooper returning having almost the same age as he went but his daughter is already old !<
Wasn’t this because of gravity and not necessarily the speed at which he’s traveling. My whole understanding was because of his time spent on Miller’s planet that had a huge amount of gravity relative to Earth’s.
For things to age, information needs to be exchanged because it's by that process that entropy occurs (energy exchange isn't perfect). The basic unit of exchange is the exchange of energy which is usually in the form of electrons/protons or "light". Now if you think of a proton bouncing back and forth between two walls, from the frame of reference that the Observer shares with the proton, the length is short, for example tossing a ball in your hand up and catching it, now if you change the observers frame of reference, say dude is watching you toss that ball up from outside the solar system from the center of the galaxy, that same ball has travelled the distance that the solar system is travelling thru the galaxy at, along with the speed that the earth is rotating around the sun at, and the actual rotation speed of the earth. What looks like 2 feet to you, is 400 kms to someone else.
Now the protons involved in the system have to physically travel farther from different references. The protons of the ball watched from the center of the galaxy travel farther from your observation point, vs if your observation point was attached to the earth.
And because your frame of reference changes, so does the speed entropy affects you at; along with the speed of your physical perceptions (energy needs to be exchanged for perception to occur)
Time is relative, changes based off of speed, frame of reference, proximity to a gravitational force.
Basically, if you go fast enough, chang reference enough or are cloae enoigh to a massive gravitational force, time "stretches".
But because here on earth you'd be outside of any of these changes, it would still take the same amount of time. But in a lightspeed rocket, you're going fast enough that the relativity of time has changed.
Hopefully, someone who is smart can say if this is right or not cause I read 4 or 5 things about light bouncing off of mirrors at light speed/flipping a quarter in a plane and ot staying in the same spot and it hurt my brain.
no. Again the only way I can wrap my head around it is to split the worlds, and merge them back.
So lets say instead of 4 hours its 4 years. and instead of one second its 10 seconds. You would age 10 seconds but the world around you would age 4 years. They watched you running around for 4 years, but you only ran for 10 seconds in your world. Once you stop the worlds merge....., they're older by 4 years, and you only lost 10 seconds. It's wild stuff to digest.
I think once you find a way to digest it, trust me it will make sense. The movie Interstellar might help. like someone mentioned the movie before
Wasn’t this explained in a movie? Like he left for space and he came back, his toddler daughter when he left was basically the age of a senior citizen by the time he got back.
Yes, interstellar. An excellent movie using relativity.
For anyone that haven't watched it, they are trying to find a new planet for humanity. They had already sent scouts to explore a few planets. They received their reports and are now ready to go to the planets and actually begin the new settlement, while Earth gets ready to pickup whats left and join them with whats left of humanity.
When they set out to reach the other explorers/new planets, they explain they must make a decision. That every planet they reach will offset their timeline with the earth timeline. Essentially if they land on 3 out of the 5 planets and they turn out to not be hospitable, by the time they reach the fourth, humanity might be extinct. Because at the speed they're going, their human life might last multiple generations, and life on earth is ending.
Its another - even less intuitive (to me anyway) - part of relativity.
Main difference between velocity and gravitational is that gravitational time dilation is not reciprocal. So observers on the ship and on earth would agree (if they could communicate without delay) that the clocks in the ships are slower.
With velocity time dilation, both observers would perceive the other's clock as slower.
But like…..if something moves fast we can see it right? Like when we see a car going 70mph vs a human running….we can clearly see something going fast.
So why wouldn’t we see just a stream of light circle the ring in just a second? Like basically how the flash moves in the DCverse. It’s still not making sense in my head
I believe this is wrong.. they wont see shit if you ran at that speed.. thats gonna be an almost instant run.. but you would have covered less distance of the trackx50.. but i still dont understand how
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u/JovahkiinVIII Nov 27 '24 edited Nov 28 '24
This is not an explanation but it’s a way I like to visualize it
You accelerate to 99% the speed of light, and fly towards Jupiter
From your perspective, Jupiter suddenly gets a lot closer, and you travel only a short distance over the course of a few minutes.
You arrive, and stop, and turn back around to look, the distance is vast, and your friend tells you it took 2 hours.
Basically, from your perspective the distance you travel is shorter, and thus the time it takes to travel that distance is shorter.
You have to get somewhere a light-hour away, so you take one step forward at nearly the speed of light, and you’re already there, an hour later
Edit: I will also clarify that the numbers probably don’t scale in real life as what I described, and it’s no doubt much weirder than this
Edit 2: a more important clarification: space does not compress from an outside perspective, but when you are travelling are those speeds objects and the space between objects appear to become flattened in the axis of your movement. I believe outside observers will also see the traveller as being flattened, although I’m not sure about that. All this has to do with light only moving at the speed of light, leading to things looking wonky