ok...i need somebody to clarify this for me...acording to einstein, if you travel at the speed of light you age slower then somebody on earth..like if you have a twin on earth and your traveling at the speed of light for like a year...you only aged 1 year but your twin on earth aged like 20 or 30 or whatever...this is what i dont get...if this is so..lets say both twins are wearing a watch....shouldnt the twin's watch who was traveling at the speed of light be slower then the twin on earth...since the twin traveling at the speed of light aged slower...his watch should reflect that by it moving slower...why is it then that the internal clocks of satellites in space tick faster then clocks on earth..wouldnt that suggest that the person traveling faster ages faster, since our physical bodies are like clocks anyway...i mean..as it is..just because the satellites clock is ticking faster doesnt mean it moved into the future...because if you brought it back to earth.....according to the earth clocks.......IT DIDNT TRAVEL ANYWHERE INTO THE FUTURE.....it just aged faster....please help me understand this
Your post is really hard to read. From what I could extract, though, you seem to be asking essentially the question of why satellites have clocks that tick faster than those on Earth, if relativity theory states that fast moving objects have clocks that tick slower. Correct? The answer is that when considering satellites in orbit around a massive body like the Earth, one also has to consider effects from general relativity theory. In particular, there's the effect of gravitational time dilation, which states that objects closer to a center of gravity (say, someone on the surface of the Earth) have clocks that ticks slower than objects further away (like satellites.) While satellites also experience the "regular" time dilation of special relativity, gravitational time dilation is the stronger effect, and the net effect is that we see their clocks tick faster than those on the surface. Hope that helps a bit.
sorry if my post was hard to read....but yeah....thats what i wanted to know..so then einsteins theory only works right in the absens of gravity?....so then if someone was to live deep within the center of the earth, time would then pass slower for the observer..correct? meaning that there is a possibility of the exact same effect as traveling at the speed of light, because time moves slower the closer you get to the center of a large body like a star or the sinularity of a black hole? time would move faster for the people on the surface of the earth then it would for a person closer to the core.
Einstein's special theory of relativity is a special case of Einstein's general theory of relativity. It's special in that it applies where there is no gravity. The general theory also takes gravity into account. The usual twin paradox is discussed for the case where there is no gravity, so only special relativity is needed. Satellites orbiting the Earth are obviously in the gravitational field of the Earth, so we must use general relativity for them. Yes, compared to somebody orbiting the Earth. Yes.
Yep. You've just about stumbled on the underlying reason there. A clock doesn't actually "measure the flow of time". It just clocks up local motion. In a nutshell, at the subatomic level the electromagnetic phenomena of electrons/protons/fields/etc move at c, and the maximum rate of motion is c. So when you're moving real fast through the universe your local motion has to be occurring at a slower rate. Hence you're time dilated. You don't notice it because it affects your brain, nerve impulses, and everything else. Like James was saying, you're combining special and general relativity here. Have a look at the picture below. It's by Phil Fraundorf, associate professor at the University of Missouri in St Louis, see http://www.umsl.edu/~fraundorfp/. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! See the red line? Clocks go slower because of the speed of the satellite. But also see the green line, clocks go faster because of the elevation. The latter is the bigger effect, hence the blue line showing the net effect. And yep, there's no "travel into the future". That's just a figure of speech. Things move, clocks clock up motion, and that's about it.
thanks for the help guys. i was a little stumped on this. you guys explained it good for me....reason i was asking is because i have a lot of good theories, but dont know the math i have a blog on my theories, more like my thoughts and some notes if you guys wanted to take a look and mabye add some math to it in comments would be great secretsoftheuniverserevealed.blogspot.com/ i cant post links yet so i took out the http. and thanks again!
In addition to the time dilation, is it possible that an average sized person on earth would be smaller than than an average sized person in space(where gravity would be much less). Do atoms expand and contract depending on gravitational pressure?
