Is it true that the faster you travel in space, the faster time goes by?

Question

I've heard that if we could travel at the speed of light, we could travel many years in the future too. Is this true?

Answer 1

Actually, you have it a little backwards.

if you were traveling at the speed of light, time would actually go the same speed relative to you. You would not notice a difference. However, relative to normal space-time, time would move much faster.

If you went on a 3 or 4 year trip at the speed of light, and came back to Earth, you would find that people on Earth have aged many years more. What seemed like 4 years to you would be 30 or 40 to people left on Earth.

To an observer on Earth, you would actually be experiencing time slower. So in essence, you could theoretically jump ahead 30 or 40 years in time while at the same time only aging 3 or 4 years.

Answer 2

No, Time actually slows down if you travelling at the speed of light.
Haven't you heard of the so-called Twin Paradox problem which illustrates the concequences of this time dilation at luminal or near-luminal speeds.
Two twin brothers, say Dick & Harry, both 20 years old, decide to do an experiment.
Dick is an astronaut decides to visit a distant star, located some 30 light years from earth. He is able to accelerate to light speed and returns back immediately to earth. But here is the surprise. When he returns his twin brother Harry has aged some 60 years and is now 80 years old while he has aged only ten years due to time dilation effects which has acted to slow down his bodily processes (biological clocks). So Dick arrives to find he has really traveled 60 years into the future!
Time also slows near intense gravitaional bodies such as a Black Hole. Figure out why?

Answer 3

There is a confusion. Time is going SLOWER, thus you 'travel' to the future.

According to the Relativity theory, the time is specific to each observer, and the faster he goes, the slower the time.

If you travel fast (near light speed) YOUR time will be slower, while OUR time will continue as usual. After a big trip, we will spend for example 100 years, while YOU will have seen only 10 years. Thus you will feel like you went 90 years in the future: your twin brother will be 120 years old while YOU are only 30.

But it's not exactly a travel, there is no way back. The result would be same if you could stay frozen for 90 years...

Edit: iswd1 did not read the physic's news for the last 100 years, he is still with Newton physics (Einstein's theory was published in 1905).

Answer 4

If you were zipping by Earth at 1/4 the speed of light, and looked at a clock on the ground (on Earth), the clock would appear to run slower than your own. If someone standing next to the clock on the ground looked up at the clock on your ship, your clock would appear to be running slower to them. What you are doing would also appear to be in slow motion.

If you were going 1/2 the speed of light, the clocks and your musings would appear even slower to each of you. This is called time dilation and we generally say that the faster you go, the more time slows down.

This is only noticable at speeds a considerable fraction of the speed of light. It does happen while you're driving your car on the freeway as well but it's such a small effect you don't notice.

Albert Einstine didn't discover this though. A man named Lorentz did through mathematical derivation. He was so perplexed by his discovery that he thought it was rediculous and apologized for it when he published it.

About the time speeding up, you are thinking of the identical twin paradox where one twin stays on Earth and the other takes off in a spaceship at some fraction of the speed of light and returns to Earth to find the other twin has aged many years.

As the twin in the spaceship is speeding off at a fraction of the speed of light, and looks back at Earth, time indeed looks to be running slow. But this is only when there is no acceleration (which include deceleration). When the twin in the ship turns around, acceleration occures because the twin must slow to a stop in one direction and speed up in another direction. This is the cause for the Earth bound twin being older.

For an indepth discussion at why this is, go to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_paradox

Answer 5

Yes, as you approach the speed of light, time slows down. But it is all relative. For example, if you set two identical watched for the exact same time, then sent one into space, where they orbit very fast, the watches would end up different. The one in space would show a time behind that of the one on earth. So if you could go really, really fast, like close to the speed of light, then if you did that for about 10 minutes, you would return to earth and it would be 1 year later. The times I used are just made up, but you get the idea.

Answer 6

Yes. But keep in mind that time travels faster for the space traveller. For someone observing the space traveller racing through space, time won't go faster. I think they proved this part of Einsteins General Relativity Theory true when they put atomic clocks on spacecraft and the spacecraft travelled very, very fast through space (but not anywhere close to the speed of light). When the atomic clocks were checked they had moved ahead very slightly into the future.

Answer 7

No matter how fast you travel, you are still counting seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, years, decades, centuries ....... at the same rate and the same amount of time will have passed everywhere when you get to your destination.

If you travel at twice the speed of light for one year, one year will have passed. The speed of light is a unit of measure. That's all.

Answer 8

The closer you get to the speed of light, the slower time goes for you. If you go the speed of light for a year no time will pass for you, but on earth it will be one year later, so it will seem like traveling into the future.

Answer 9

That is the accepted theory at this time. However Einstein theorized that no mass could enter the speed of light. And even if we can, we dont have the technology to do it.

Answer 10

No, neither is true.

No matter how fast you are going, you are still a part of "now", you will simply go a further distance over a period of time.

Consider if you traveled around earth at or faster than the speed of light, compared to going say, 25,000 mph (Normal space flight)... the only difference would be that you would have gone around the planet 10,000 times versus 1 time, or whatever. I haven't done the calculations to see just how many times you'd go around.

How fast you travel has nothing to do with time at all. If you left your home and went to the store 1 mile away at 60mph, it would take you one minute. You would have aged 1 minute.

If you went at 120mph, you would have taken 30 seconds to get to the store, and therefor only aged 30 seconds, but still traveled the same distance.

You are not bending time in any way, you are simply decreasing the amount of time it takes to get from point A to point B.

Where people get confused is between long distances. Say you had to go 1 million miles. I am not sure what the speed of light is, so we'll just use 1 million mph for this experiment. Now, it would take you one hour to get there. Others, traveling at 25,000 mph, it would take them 40 hours. When they get there, they will still be the same age as you, because you are aging at the same rate they are. You will simply have been waiting there for them for 39 hours.

See what I mean?

**EDIT**

You guys are so clueless.

Increasing speed does not slow down time no matter how you look at it. If I am going 60 mph instead of 30 mph, I am simply going a further distance in a shorter period of time. Because I am going faster does not mean time is slowing down for me. You're all nuts.