wondering about time?

Question

if time is relitive to speed. would less time have passed, since the big bang. on a planet moving faster than our own ? if so would we traval time by going there ? sorry if this seems remedal i am poorley educated

Answer 1

Time might be different on another planet but OUR PERCEPTION of time would not be. In other words if we went to this planet of yours and only experienced 1 'earth year' it would feel like one earth year to us and earth would have experienced 1 year but we would only have aged at the relative rate of that planet, which is in essence a form of time travel.

Not a dumb question at all.

Answer 2

Time changes for objects in motion. But for objects moving as slow as planets, the difference is very, very small - millionths of a second. Technically, yes, you would time travel in such a journey, but who's going to notice a few millionths of a second difference?

Actually, much more important than the difference between the planets is the speed you use to get there. The theory of relativity predicts that if one of twin brothers leaves home in a space ship and spends a considerable amount of time travelling at high velocity with respect to his home inertial frame, then, when the traveller returns home, he will find himself physiologically younger than his stay-at-home brother, and his pocket watch will have performed correspondingly fewer revolutions. This has been verified experimentally, although at the speed we can travel (a fast jet) you have to use an atomic clock to measure the time differences. So if you traveled very fast to that planet, then came back to earth, you'd find that your clock is slower than your friends'. And if you traveled VERY fast, you'd find yourself in the future.

Robert Heinlein wrote a pretty good sci-fi story about this phenomena, called "Time For the Stars," which uses twins to show the aging difference for some interstellar missions.

Answer 3

The Lorenz contraction is the slowing of time for an object/frame of reference either in motion or in a higher gravitational field that an object/frame of reference at rest or in free fall. However, it only is apparent when objects reach a signficant percentage of the speed of light.

We normally don't talk about planets in motion, but about people in spacecraft. If a team of astronomers decided to go and see planets forming around the star Vega, which is about 30 light years away, and traveled at .5c, they would arrive at Vega in fifteen years. If we on Earth could look at their spacecraft with a high-powered telescope, they would appear to age much more slowly than we do. If we could communicate with them instantaneously, such as through telepathy, we would find them speaking/thinking much more slowly than those of us on Earth.

If the scientists stayed near Vega for a year and then returned at the same rate, we on Earth would experience 31 years. The scientists would experience just less than 27 years, though. If they traveled at .9c instead, they would only experience 14 years.

It's not a way to time travel, but it is a good way to lose touch with the rest of your life.

In Robert Heinlein's book Time For the Stars, one of a pair of telepathic twins is sent on a spacecraft to explore nearby stars and the other is kept at home as a means of communication, and they have to, at one point, drug the twins so that they can communicate, because the Earth twin is thinking so slowly with respect to the traveling twin. The two twins are teenagers when one leaves Earth, and when the traveling twin returns, only a few years later, his brother is a man in his 80's or 90's.

Answer 4

Time actually moves at a slightly different rate for all objects moving relative to each other. It just gets more noticable when they're going really fast. But if you had a good enough watch, you'd measure a different amount of time passing every time you drove to the post office, compared to your wife who stayed home.

Answer 5

How fast are you going to go while you are traveling there? 100 miles per hour? 1,000,000 miles per hour? Notice that no matter how fast and far you travel, an hour has past.

How fast is the planet you reside on moving? 2,000,000 miles per hour. 20,000,000 miles per hour? 100,000,000 miles per hour? Notice that whether you have gone 2,000,000 miles or 100,000,000 miles, an hour has past.

Look at the light just now reaching us from a star 15 billion light years away. You are looking at light particles from a star at their current location as they are now, not a star, or the past. If you go to that star instantly, it will be as it is now. If you go half way to that star, it will be as it is now. If you leave now and go to that star at 15 billion light years an hour, it will be an hour older when you get there and the earth will be an hour older.