In this thought experiment, my twin brother and I are both turning 20 at the airport.
At midnight on our birthday, we are both exactly age 20 years.
He stays put while I get on a 777 and fly around the world. The flight takes me 24 hours and so he waits 24 hours. I arrive and we are both age 20 years plus 24 hours.
If I instead get on an SR-71 and fly around the world at 3x speed of the 777, the flight takes me 8 hours so he waits 8 hours. I arrive and we are both age 20 years plus 8 hours. Clearly, we are both younger in this scenario than the first one.
If I got onto a super plane flying at 0.99x light speed and fly around the world, the flight takes me 1 second. Since I’m so fast, he should also only wait one second. Intuitively, I’m back and we’re both 20 years and 1 second old.
But my understanding of time dilation is that I’m 20 years and 1 second old when I’m back, but he would be much older since I was almost going at light speed.
Why is that? My flight and his wait time should both be much much shorter since I was flying much much faster.
In: Physics
Everything in our universe is always moving at the rate of the universal constant (better known as the speed of light). This is the sum total of movement through our 4 Dimensional universe.
X+Y+Z+T=C
Where XYZ represents 3D space, T is time, and C is the universal constant. Due to the relatively slow nature of our traversal of 3D space, most of our motion is through time. Say you have 2 clocks synced exactly. One remains on the ground and the other is placed in a very high speed orbit. The equation must always equal C so if XYZ goes up then T must go down. From the ground’s perspective, the clock in orbit will appear to tick slower and it will fall behind the stationary clock.
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