If someone traveled in a spaceship to Pluto and back, they would be a different age then everyone on earth. How is this possible?
In: Physics
Time is effected by gravity and/or speed.
The faster you go, the slower you experience time and so the slower you age. Likewise, the more gravity that’s interacting with your mass, the slower you age. Theoretically, if you managed to reach the speed of light, time stops entirely.
So, in your thing, if you traveled exceedingly fast, you’d age slower and be younger than the people back on Earth through the same time-frame. How much slower depends on how fast you go.
When two clocks move at different speeds relative to each other, they tick at different rates. This isn’t because there’s something wrong with the clocks, it’s because time literally slows down as you speed up.
To go to Pluto and back in reasonable time, you have to go pretty fast. As you fly there and back, you’re going very fast relative to earth, so time slows down for you relative to earth. If 1 year passed on earth a smaller amount will have passed for you. You’ll be “younger” than you would have been if you’d just stayed on earth, you’ll have experienced fewer seconds of time.
The amount that time slows down depends on how fast you’re going. Unless you get up to appreciable fractions of the speed of light it’s not noticeable to us. It’s enough that hyper-accurate clocks, like used for GPS, need to take it into account though.
Note: if you measure your age by years as in “number of times the earth went around the sun”, then *that* doesn’t change, because you going to Pluto and back didn’t do anything to the earth’s orbit around the sun. But if you had two identical clocks that both started at 0 at the start of your journey, the clock that went with you will show less time passed than the clock that stayed on earth.
Time relativity. If I am correct, and I will let the physics work their magic, by the time the traveler is there and back, while it might have seen like a short time for him, in reality, for us on Earth maybe decades have passed
Ok. Thanks. I am not a Physicist so my understanding is nowhere near yours. Thanks for clarifying
Latest Answers