Could somebody explain the deal with "time dilation"? I think it involves time travel.?

Question

I'm really intruiged by it. Could you please only answer if you really know what you're talking about.

Answer 1

Time Dialation is a predicted effect of relativity.

As you accelerate, time dialates, or slows down, but only from your frame of reffrence.

Imagine you have a twin, you were both born at the same time. (C-Section or something, I dunno.) You hop on a spaceship traveling at near light speeds for a few years and your twin stays home.

When you came back, your twin would be dead and gone and hundreds of years would have passed, but it would only have been a few years for you. This effect is also experinced near black holes.

To understand this, I'll use a thought experiment. You don't need any equipment. Einstien was a big fan of these. I like them too.

We've got a telescope on the moon and Superman's standing on Earthand ready to fly out here to meet you. He's a nice guy to help us out with this, so be sure to thank him. He flys out the first time and you watch him through the telescope.

Now let's understand what's happening here. Superman is out in space flying towards us. Light reflects off him and we see it through our telescope.

We think Superman can do better than this, so we tell him to do it again, but at just under light speed this time. Superman, does and as we watch him and it goes REALLY fast. No supprise, he's going really fast. The light bounces off him in one place, then the next place light bounces off him, he's only a tiny bit behind the light that bounced off him last time. So when they get to us, we get it almost all at once.

Now, we tell Superman about Relativity and how he can't possibly travel faster than light. His pride is on the line now, so he goes back for one more trip. This time, faster than light. And as we watch through the telescope we're absolutly baffled by what we see. So supprised, that we don't even notice Superman standing next to us.

When we looked through the telescope, we saw Superman flying FROM us TO Earth backwards!

Superman laughs, being a relativity buff, (He was just messing with us earlier, wanted to see the look on our faces. Superman's a jerk sometimes.) and tells us that we see that because light travels at a constant speed. So, when he surpassed that speed he passed the light particles reflected off him, so what we saw was the last image first backwards to the beginning. The light that bounced off before he landed was the closest, so we saw that first.

This is not WHY time dialation works, but it's an example of how we would observe it occouring.

I hope that helps.

Answer 2

I'm not sure of the details of her answer, but socialdee is incorrect in stating time slows down from the travelers point of view. If you travel at or near the speed of light, time seems to go by normally for you, your watch ticks just as it always does. But If you look back on earth, everything has sped up, the clocks are going wild. If the people on earth could see you, they would see your clock slow down and almost stop.