I need someone to make sense of it for me. I appreciate the clock scenario where it stays at 12 o’clock if you move away from it at the speed of lìght, but regardless of how fast someone travels, their body will still age just as fast as anyone else (roughly). I don’t understand how just putting distance between someone’s self and the rest of Earth would somehow make them age at a slower rate? You’re aging, just further away..
Hope this makes sense!
In: Physics
The time dilation of special relativity is not an optical result of light taking longer to catch up. It is an objective fact – if I move relative to you near the speed of light, time will in actual fact be moving slower for me. This has been experimentally confirmed with extremely accurate clocks.
There is an additional observational factor that has to do with light’s finite speed of travel, but as you suspect that doesn’t affect how much time passes for us, it just affects how we see something. If you take all the light you see and put it through the calculations to correct for the mere finite speed effects, you will still see time dilation happening.
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