can you tell me how is this possible that when you reach the speed close to speed of light time slows down?

Answer 1

time does not actually slow down for you, if you are the one travelling. Time will procede normally for you, and time will procede normally to any observer, but there will be a dilation if one tries to compare the two. So lets look at that.

imagine that you are standing on some railroad tracks next to a train's box car, and in the box car a friend is bouncing a ball directly up and down. So, if you are 20 meters away from the bouncing ball, and your friend is right next to it, you both would still see the ball bouncing at roughly the same time. This is because the path length that the light reflected from the ball must travel for you to see it is very close to equal for the both of you. Recall that speed, or velocity, is distance over time:
v=d/t
thus
t= d/v
, the time it takes for the light to reach your eyes is the distance it must travel divided by the speed at which the light travels, which we will hold constant, is going to be of great importance to understanding time and velocity.
Hopefully, this shows that with a small distance (20m) and a huge velocity (3.0x10^8m/s) that t is very small and nearly identical to both yours and your friend's preceptions.

Now imagine that the train is moving away from you at 1/2 the speed of light. Your friend and the ball are both moving at the same speed, thus the only extra distance the light has to travel is what is in between them, thus still very small and things appear to be normal for your friend. However, you are not moving and your friend is firing away from you at 1.5x10^8m/s. Thus for every second of your friend's travel, the light has to travel an additional 15,000,000m. So, by our above equation (t = d/v) velocity stays the same, and d increases, thus the time it takes for the light to reach you must take a longer amount of time. Now, because it takes a longer time for you to see what your friend is doing, he/she will appear to be moving slower inside the box car as they bounce the ball. But we know that they are still moving in the same time frame, for themselves, as if they weren't moving.

This "dilation" of time frames exponentiates as the one being observed goes faster, because the light will have a farther distance to travel per second. Thus, as someone approaches the speed of light, they will come to almost a complete stop if they could be seen by a stationary observer.

Answer 2

First of all we have to understand that our perception of time will always be the same, a minute will always "feel" like a minute even though our speed is close to the speed of light.We won't feel that we are living longer if we go faster.
What will change, is how the observers are perceiving us. If they could watch us traveling at very high speeds, our movements will slow down more and more the closer we get to the speed of light. If we could go back and compare our clocks, there will be a noticeable difference in them. The time slows down for the observer that has been under acceleration forces, not the one that has stay in an inertial reference.
Time also slows down under gravitational fields. We must understand that gravitational forces are the same as acceleration forces.
All this that sounds so weird, is explained in a simple way in many books about relativity.

Answer 3

Not "when you reach the speed of light". This always happens when you move - the greater the speed, the more the time difference.
it is a geometric effect. If two cars travel at an angle to each other, it would look to the driver of each car, that the other car is going slower (falling behind) then his own.
Same thing with time. We are all "moving" along the axis of time (with the speed of light actually) all the time. If both you and I are at rest with respect to each other, our time axis are parralel, but if you start moving in space, your time axes turns a little (the faster you move, the more it turns), and becomes at angle to mine, so, exactly as in the example with moving cars, it will look to you that I am moving (along the time axis) slower then you, while I will think, that it is you, whose time slows down.

Answer 4

Time is running at a particular pace (seconds, minutes, etc). Once you hit the speed of light, which is impossible, currently we are able to reach the speed of sound. The speed of light is so fast that it defeats time. You would be going so fast that time would barely exist. Lets say you travel around the world if you traveled at light speed you would probably come back to your point of lift off within an hour of takeoff.

Answer 5

If you move at the speed of light and you are wearing a wrist watch your watch will continue to read the nomal time when you look at it. It comes from Einsteins time dilation formula. which says that from different frames of reference time is different to another observer.
So if you mother was keeping taps on you by observing you thru super duper binoculars and read your watch she would think that time had come to slow down to a stop.
That is Einstein relativity of time. It sound like a magic trick.

Answer 6

The answer to this question has to do with what our universe is composed of. All forms of matter have as their basis electromagnetic energy (photons). This energy first forms into electrons, which in turn form all other mass. Mass formed of this energy still has the speed of the photon contained within it. This is observed when electrons come apart. The energy released is high-frequency photons, the same as that which originally formed them.

What this does is form a constant velocity within our universe that is common to all mass and energy forms. Everything moves at the speed of light - the value of "c", mass just does not evidence its speed. As a person begins moving, the energy within their body has a proportional amount of energy added to them in direction of movement. The movement toward the speed of light causes the person to move toward the condition that they would be converted directly into, that as what forms their existence - electromagnetic energy. The faster they move the more energy becomes existent in direction of travel, and the less energy there is at right angles to that direction. Were a person to move to the speed of light, 186,000 miles per second, they would no longer have any mass, but would be converted directly into electromagnetic energy. At that time there would be no physical time. To have time, there must exist three-dimensional mass, which has the potential of existing in a state less than that of the speed of light.

There is a short writing at http://360.yahoo.com/noddarc that you can scroll down to. It is entitled, "The Problem and Repair of Relaivity". Its easy to read and understand.

Answer 7

Einstein's space-travelling relativity

For example, if you were to travel at 95% the speed of light for 10 years in your spaceship, the Lorenz equations will tell you that 32 years will pass for people on Earth. When you return to Earth, because time ran slower for you, you've travelled 22 years into the future.

Answer 8

I think that is like asking how is it possible that gravity keeps us stuck to the earth and we don't just all float away. It's just how the universe works. By the 'rules' of the universe, figured out by Einstien, time is just another dimension. As 'we in our space-ship' get closer and closer to the speed of light the direction that we are moving in gets shorter and shorter. We don't notice this because our rulers are getting shorter and shorter too(as long as they are pointed in that direction!)

Our mass increases too, so we get heavier and heavier and that makes it harder and harder to go any faster PLUS we have less and less fuel to burn to push us any faster.

Time gets slower and slower....and God forbid that we actually made it to the speed of light...time would stop for us. There is no going faster than light because in your new environment there is no time at all. No time for coffee, no time to take a breath, no time to push a button, no time for fuel to burn.

Ask yourself how come a photon of light, a tiny piece of energy, can survive the journey from a galaxy across the entire universe and hit your eye. The answer is that from the light's point of view...it took no time at all!

Answer 9

If anything go faster than the speed of light then yes
because everything around you would be going a slower speed cause everything to be motionless.

Answer 10

It's a gift of extra time to make up for running that fast and finding out that is would be quite boring and dangerous