Those measurements of the speed of light done in the late 19th and early 20th century had a funny characteristic in that if you average them over time to avarage out the "noise" of measurement errors, the speed of light was slowing down. It did not stabilize until "science" started using the atomic clock as the measure of time around 1965. If light is slowing then probably the atomic clock is slowing at the same rate and therefore "Einstein was relatively right" for a few decades!! Max
if one travels at the "speed of light" time stands still for the traveler making any distance traveled feel like an instant. however, those observing the traveler will still be in the constraints of time-- a year in this case. isn' this the basis of einsteins theory ? i think aphie is correct in this case. best, cold surfer
so you have a personal relationship with the creator of the universe? LOL.....i find that a little hard to believe.
Time dilation and length contraction are always fascinating. Both relativity and quantum mechanics give many predictions that are counter-intuitive and yet supported by experiments. I guess it is becoming more and more difficult to understand nature.
One thing I always wondered about that. To the space traveller, it appears as if Earth is blasting away at the speed of light, while his destination flies forward also at the speed of light. Shouldn't that mean that the "observer" in this case sees the Earth spend 10 years in travel? Another way to explain this question is the typical science thing we all got in school. One twin jumps on a rocket and flies around for a while at a significant percentage of light speed. Then he comes home to find his Earth-bond twin to be much older than he is. But from the Rocketship twin's point of view, the Earth was doing all the travelling, so shouldn't he expect to see his twin younger than him?
The rocketship twin is returning to the frame of reference of the earth twin. The faster one travels the less time it takes to travel. Someone said the same thing on the other thread using jet travel and time zones. http://www.phy.ntnu.edu.tw/java/relativeVelocity/relativeVelocity.html
This is one of the harder questions that I've researched and it took some time for it to sink it. All of this is anti-intuitive. I will give you a very quick answer and then point you to an excellent site that does a much more complete job of explaining this "paradox." I was told that the simplest way to explain this problem is the two frames of reference are not equal. The person who experiences "acceleration" is the one actually doing the traveling. Although the spaceship twin could look at Earth and say that it is moving away, in reality the people on Earth will not feel that acceleration and therefore there is a difference between the two frames. That isn't the best explanation, but here is a website to get you started. The best way for anyone to begin to understand this subject is to realize two very important things. a) There is no universal time b) Space / Time are deeply connected and not completely seperate http://mentock.home.mindspring.com/twins.htm