Are there any examples of relative time (theory of relativity)?

Question

I have read about the relativity theory but i couldnt grasp that time is relative.

Answer 1

It's simple. As speed increases, time slows down. For example, if you put a record on a record-player, the center of the disc travels slower than the edged of the disk. Scientists placed hyper-sensitive clocks at the nortth pole and at the equator. like the disc, the north pole represents the center, and it moves slower than the fast revolving equatorial zones. Comparisons proved that the clock placed at the equator moved slower than the one at the pole.

Another way to look at this is a little mind game. Imagine that you are riding on a beam of light coming off of a clock face just as the clock strikes noon. As you look back, what does the clock say? It says noon, right? But because nothing travels faster than the speed of light, if you were riding that wave for say a year (measured on earth) and looked back, the clock would still be frozen at noon. Time would have stopped completely. Get it?

Time is relative to speed.

Hope this helps.

Answer 2

Yes there is proof that Einstein's equations all work. In particle accelerators at like, Geneva and Fermelab, they explode atoms and measure lifetimes of the elements that were made. At still life they didn't live as long as when they were travelling at a fraction of the speed of light. The machine used was the Tevatron.

To help you understand how time can be relative...consider time taken to travel to a far away planet. If the Planet is 100 ly away, it should take you at least 100.00001 years to reach it, because the speed of light is unattainable.
Now, Say your spaceship is travelling at .5c, half the speed of light. If should take you 200 years to reach it right?
No...You see, if people from earth send light at you every year, you will not recieve 200 light beams. Since you are travelling away from the light/earth at .5 c, you recieve a fraction as much, since you travel distance as the light also travels towards you...Sorry i don't feel like figuring out how many light beams you will actually see.
So you end up seeing only about 150 light beams, while they say 200. You are that many years younger than people on earth.

Answer 3

As doug pointed out, this has been observed in space probes. In fact, the satellites of the Global Positioning System were designed to take both the special and general relativistic time dilation into account. If not, they would not have worked for very long and would be useless today.

This is also commonly observed in high-speed particles. A famouns test measured the flux of muons generated by cosmic rays on top of a mountain and at nearly sea level. Muons have a limited lifetime and decay exponentially just like in radioactivity. The obeserved numbers on the mountain and sea level showed that the half-life of the muons, which were moving at nearly the speed of light, was longer than muons at rest by exactly the factor predicted by special relativity.

Answer 4

Actually, time only 'slows down' or 'speeds up' with respect to an observer in one reference frame as they observe something happening in another reference frame.

To answer your question, yes. The atomic clocks used on space probes have been measured to 'slow down' with respect to Earth based clocks. Since the speeds involved are fairly slow ('non-relativistic' as they say) the amount of change isn't very much. But atomic clocks are accurate enough to allow it to be detected. And, to within the limit of the measurement accuracy, they slow down just *exactly* by the amount predicted by relativity.


Doug

Answer 5

spatial co-ordinates and time still have an absolute character only as long as they are directly measurable by stationary clocks and bodies. But they are relative in so far as they depend on the state of motion of the selected inertial system. there can be endless inertial systems, so there can be endless example of the relativity of time.

Answer 6

lights that reaches your eyes from a distance star might have been thousands or millions of years ago from a long dead star. There's a time difference from a observer standpoint right there.

Answer 7

time is relative and has its own axis ..as u refer light cone here the space time gets bend there fore one can be made available in all axis as parallael manner until he travells at light speed

Answer 8

http://www.tenthdimension.com/flash2.php
This might explain it.