According to (my understanding of) Einstein, the slower I go through space, the faster I go through time. So If I’m alone, with no point of reference, am I travelling through time at maximum speed, or am I travelling through space at the speed of light ?
In: 0
>the slower I go through space, the faster I go through time
This is not correct either. You can’t move “faster through time”. Faster with respect to what? You’re always moving through time at the rate of 1 second per 1 second.
This probably come from the misunderstanding of velocity 4-vector. Velocity 4-vector is always normalized. When you move through spacetime, the only thing that describe how you move is the worldline. If you think of spacetime as a piece of paper, the worldline is the trace of a curve you draw on a paper using a pen. But *how* you draw that curve does not matter, the way you move your pen doesn’t matter, your pen could move fast or slow and you still get the same trace. For mathematical simplicity, it’s common to normalize the speed of this pen so that it always move at constant speed. And that’s what 4-velocity does. But that does not mean you are physically moving through spacetime like that. The “pen” is just a mathematical tool, an abstraction to describe the worldline.
Latest Answers