Why does time slow as an object nears the speed of light? How is this possible?

Question

What happens to the object and time if an object exceeds the speed of light?

Answer 1

Since they already told you the mathematical answer, here is the conceptual one.

Imagine this:

You are standing in a lab. Your friend is standing on a kart on which a light clock has been built. The clock consists of two mirrors. One if mounted on the floor of the kart and the other is supended above it. The mirrored sides are facing.

A photon of light bounces between the two mirrors. It hits the bottom mirror every second. Now your friend syncronizes the light clock to your watch so they both tick at the same rate.

Then the kart is set in motion and travels with a velocity which is a large percentage of the speed of light.

From your friend's point of view on the kart, the photon is still going up and down. But from your point of view, as the kart goes by, the photon is going up and down while moving sideways along with the kart, so it appears to you that it takes a diagonal path up and a diagonal path down.
Trigonometry tells us that the diagonal path is longer than the straight up or down that your friend on the kart see's. Now this is the tricky part...

For the photon to hit the mirror at the same your watch ticks, traveling the path that you see it taking, it HAS to speed up because it has farther to go. The problem is, it can't speed up because the speed of light is constant. As a result, your watch ticks before the photon hits the mirror and to you it appears that the light clock is running slow. To your friend, the light clock is running just fine. This means that to you, EVERYTHING on the kart is running slow, and time on the kart has slowed down.

Now, the same thing is going on from your friend's point of view when he looks at you on the ground as he goes by on the kart. Your watch looks like it's running slow, and everything you do appears to be running slow and from his point of view, your time has slowed down.

Back to the kart, the faster it goes, the longer the path you see the photon take becomes, which means that the less diagonal and more horizonal it becomes. It never becomes completely horizontal for mathematical reasons but it comes close enough to it such that the photon NEVER gets to the mirror it was traveling to. What's happening on the kart from your perspective? Time has stopped.

Pretty funky eh?

According to the actual equations, we cannot exceed the speed of light and time can't go backwards. That may be correct or it may be that there is what's called a discontinuity...basically where the rules of the game change in the middle of it.

Experiments indicate that things may be able to occure faster than the speed of light, however, information itself cannot be transmitted faster than the speed of light.

Answer 2

Every thing starts from the measurement of speed of light in vacuum.

Speed of light was measured from the earth when the earth was moving toward a ray of light and when it was moving away from the earth.

The accuracy of measurement was so high that we cannot make any error by the way of measurement.

Our experience with ordinary speed says that when we move toward a beam of light
the light beam should reach us sooner than when we were at rest. Similarly it should reach us late if we move away from that. But the above experiment has confirmed that the speed of light remains the same in what ever speed we go.

We measure the speed of light by dividing the distance it has traveled by the time taken for the light to cover that distance.

Theoretically it has been proved that the speed of light is a constant for different observer if the time and length of a moving observer changes with its speed.

Many experiments with particles have proved the same.

Now imagine we are moving toward a light beam with a speed very near to the speed of light, c.

We measure the speed of light. We now know it must be also c. This is possible only if our distance and time is also very small.

From this we conclude if we reach the speed of light the distance and time becomes exactly zero. The meaning of distance and time no more exists. That is the reason that we say that no material object can not move with the speed of light.

Answer 3

I dont know about what happens if it exceeds (i don't think tha you can).
but now to understand what happens as we reach speed of light. Think of a clock in a spaceship that measures time by a ray striking a mirror surface. So there are two mirror surfaces and in between there is a ray. As you approach speed of light the ray will have to travel more of a slant path because the whole space ship is movin too fast. It's hard to envision. REMEMBER that if you are on the ship its all right, but you have to be normal observer to see this. Now say that you are watching that clock and the ray left one of the mirror surfaces, if it just goes to the other side directly perpendicularly it will not reach it (because the ship is moving so by the time the ray gets there the other surface already went up some) so it takes a longer path and longer path means more time (as the speed of light is constant 3 times 10^8 m/s). So a regular second will be less then a second there.
I did my best with words hope this helps.
Good luck.

Answer 4

This effect is called the Time Dialation, and is the consequence of the Lorentz Transformation. Consider the formula:
t=t'/square root (1-v^2/c^2).
It cna be clearly seen from this formula that the proper time time of the moving object is always less than the corresponding interval in the rest frame. This implies that a moving clock runs slower as it nears the speed of light.
Nothing travels at a sped more than that of light. This is the most important inference of the Special Theory of Relativity. So ur second question is insignificant.

Answer 5

Check out this question from a few days back: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/?qid=1006053106633

The second question answer is simply "because that is how nature works." More insteresting is why you ASKED that question; that is because it is counter-intuitive to your everyday experience and that is only because the speed of light is so darn large.

If the speed of light was low, like it became for Mr. Tompkins in the book below, it would just be "the way it is." If you grew up in a spaceship orbiting the sun, and then one day landed on a planet like the earth at night, you would be amazed that the sky is blue when the sun came up. "Why is the sky blue? How is this possible?" You might not know the answer to the first, but you would not ask the question to the second anyway, simply because you are used to it being blue!

A nice light fiction book that explores this is called "Mr. Tompkins in Wonderland" by George Gamow.

Answer 6

time dialation is what this effect is called. It is quite measurable too. Muons who have a very short lifetime are generated way up in the atmosphere above us. However, their lifetime is so short, how can we actually detect their existance?

Why? Because they are moving close to the speed of light, that the time they are around is dialated (slowed down) by this formula: t = to[1/SQRT(1-v^2/c^2)]

In addition to the time slowing down, as a particle with mass moves faster, the mass of the particle grows--the energy put into moving it faster actually becomes mass from the famous Einstein postulate: E = mc^2

Therefore time will slow and the object gets more massive as it reaches the speed of light. The mass would be infinite as it approaces c.

Answer 7

Here is yet another way to look at "time dilation".

All objects are moving not only through space, but through time as well. Einstein and Co called this "Space-time".

Einstein proved that the speed of light is constant, and he ALSO proved that everything is ALWAYS moving at the speed of light!! Crazy, right?

Not quite. See, everything is moving through space-TIME at the speed of light. For most objects, like baseballs, cats, amoebas, planets, they are translating through space and a fairly slow rate compared to time. The remainder of their speed-of-light speed is being used to propel them forward in TIME.

So: When an object is accelerated towards the speed of light, what really is happening is the portion of speed-of-light speed that was being used by the object to move through time is now being used to move the object through 3 dimensional space! The constancy of the speed of light is preserved, it is simply moved around a bit!
With less velocity in the time dimension, time, for the object being accelerated, will seem to slow down.

Pretty cool, eh?

Answer 8

This phenomenon has to do with the constancy of the speed of light. For all intertial frames of reference, the speed of light is always a constant, c.

To keep things short, the equation d=rt (distance=(rate)(time) may be used to show time slowing. If I rearrange the equation, I receive r=d/t; or, c (the speed of light)=d/t. If the speed of light is constant for all intertial frames of reference (meaning, at any speed I may be moving), and I can measure the speed of light to be constant at each frame, I must adjust the variables "d" or "t" to keep c the same.

Therefore, time and space tend to dilate and contract (respectively) due to this constancy in "c."


This is a really sketchy explanation. I would suggest reading into it a little more to get a better idea of this concept.

Answer 9

positioned it this manner -- vacationing on the value of light, it would take extra or less 4 years to realize Alpha Centauri FROM the attitude OF AN OBSERVER in the international. in case you have been the single PILOTING the spacecraft, time outdoors the deliver might seem to decelerate relative to your individual time as you got closer to the value of light -- with the objective to you, it would look like the holiday basically took a couple of minutes. so a methods as how quickly would desire to a deliver bypass....your significant limits are going to be how lots gasoline you may carry, and how rapidly you may improve up utilising the gasoline obtainable. in case you have been waiting to construct a deliver like the theoretical Bussard ramjet -- which might use a great magnetic container to "scoop" ambient hydrogen from the close to-vacuum of area and use it for gasoline -- your gasoline furnish could be effectively infinite, and suitable velocity might ultimately be desperate by ability of friction against that common volume of hydrogen nevertheless in area. I examine as quickly as that physicists have calculated that suitable velocity to be approximately 60% lightspeed.

Answer 10

It would not for the subject travelling at the speed of light, but only for those observing from a different frame of reference.