Relative time? Not a velocity depend entity?would it be a fucntion of the distance we observe motion from?

Question

The further away we observe an object the slower it appears to move?And the time of observation seems to drag?

Isnt true that if a large clock is too far away you really cant read the time?

Answer 1

I'm not sure what you are refering to. Einstein's special theory of relativity predicts that a "moving" clock actually runs slower. In addition to this, there is another effect which causes us to observe the clock "apparently" running faster or slower depending on the changing distance between the observer and the object...

Answer 2

What you're posing isn't really clear. You could be talking about angular motion, which has absolutely NOTHING to do with the relativity of time.

In fact, there's a classic experiment in which time's relativity could be "directly observed" in a situation where one could assert that the moving things never changed their distance from one preferred observer!

HOW ON EARTH COULD THIS BE?!:

Relativistic muons were injected into a circular track, where they whirled around at ~0.9997c. Such a stationary, table-top muon (O.K., I'm being fanciful here) would have a half-life to decay of only ~ 1.5 microseconds. But whirling at this speed, the measurement of their lifetime (to an observer parked at the centre, if you like) was about 30 times longer (~ 44 microseconds). This factor corresponds almost precisely to the "time-slowing factor," (1 - v^2/c^2)^(-1/2), for the v ~ 0.9997c quoted. (The carefully measured quantities agreed to something like 1%, pretty good for an experiment like this.)

This experiment may have even won a Nobel prize for its designers/experimenters; I'm hazy on that.

Live long and prosper.

P.S. Good heavens, goring, you can't be serious with your addendum? You don't need to SEE a physical clock to measure the passage of time! There are all manner of natural temporal phenomena which can serve as a surrogate for grossly imperfect macroscopic clocks. Next you'll be telling us that "if you can't see that the big hand has moved from 12 to 1, there's no way of knowing that time has passed." GRRR!!!!

Apart from radioactive deacay times, there are other "natural times" like the frequencies of atomic radiation (in fact, the second is now defined as a certain number of time-cycles associated with lines emitted by the caesium atom), or nuclear transition radiation, etc. Even rapidly rotating pulsars (corrected for neutron star "glitches" due to "starquakes") can be used as a kind of clock, to probe subtle effects of General Relativity in very small, rapidly moving orbits. "The moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on ...," and you don't need a crude mechanical clock to tell you time is passing.