What does "time is relative" mean? Can anyone explain it to me in simple terms?

Question

And is it true that time is really relative?

Super Something, is what your say is true then there is a possibility to slow aging when we move faster? For, example, if one man travel in a vehicle that travels in the speed of light then we would not age as fast as he would?

P.S. anybody even if he's not Super Something can help answer please. And one more question, how does time move faster or slower? Is it when we ourselves move faster or slower? Or when we enjoy the moment more and when we don't?

Roadwarrior (or anyone who reads the posts), so you're saying that you can slow aging by moving faster?

Answer 1

Time is relative to the speed in which you travel through space.

Answer 2

I don't know if I can explain it in simple terms - some of it gets a little complicated but yes, time IS relative, and not just subjectively. Einstein proved that definitively and its one reason why he's so incredibly famous. In fact tests have confirmed his prediction that as you approach the speed of light time will slow down (not that you'd feel it if you were in a space ship - you'd see everything outside speed up but when you got home all your friends would have died from old age) they did an experiment where a clock in a plane was flown around the world while the control clock was left on the ground - the clock that flew around was a few millionths of a second slower. Spacetime is a unified fabric - if you are still all of your movement is through time - the faster you move you're moving more through space - but less through time. At the speed of light time stops - a photon that travels all the way across the Universe in billions of years would (if it could perceive anything) perceive it all as a single instant.

Answer 3

Yes time is a relative. I give an example.
The light coming from a distant star may take several years to reach us. when it finally reaches our eyes, we see the star. But by the time it reaches our eyes, the original star may have attained another poisition in the sky, or may have been destroyed. So what we see as a star now is not the star but its image, taken several years ago. So everything we see or feel or do is actually with respect to the specific time plane in which we belong. That is the significance of time.
Again, say you crossed a road from east to west. A car came after 1 minute and crossed the same intersection, from north to south. It did not hit you, because you are already on the other side of the road. In other words, the movement of the car and your own movement, although geographically in the same location, they belong to different time plane.
From it, we can get a preliminary idea of time. If there is any incident, the question of time comes. If there is no incident, if nothing is happening, the time stops. So time is also relative to incidents.

Answer 4

Consider this set up:

A train is travelling from point A to point B. Man1 is on the train which is now approaching point B while Man2 is somewhere far from the tracks but equidistant to points A and B. Now, lightning strikes "at the same time" at points A and B.

But, did they "really" striked the ground at the same time?

Man2 says YES. Light travels at a constant speed. So, if his distance from the two points is the same, the light from the lightning at both points would have reach him at the same time. He concludes that both lightnings occured at the same time.

Man1 would say NO because he is now closer at point B while moving away from point A. Light from the lightning at point B will reach him faster than the light coming from the lightning at point A. In his point of view, he is not wrong to say that lightning first struck at point B and then followed by a lightning striking at A.

One man says they did happen at the same time.
One man says they did not.
Both are correct.
In this sense, TIME IS RELATIVE.

Answer 5

Yes, the explanation by BONTUL is the easiest and clearest way to understand that time is relative. Einstein's Theory of Relativity will also lead you to this fact: when you are inside a spaceship traveling at the speed of light, a 1-second time lapse you experience inside the spaceship has a shorter duration than a 1-second time lapse experienced by those on the earth. In other words, the 1-second time lapse inside the spaceship and on earth are actually of different durations.

Answer 6

Super something is correct. The strangeness of the thought is the reason the theory of relativity is difficult to understand, and it really only makes a significant difference at really large speeds.

Simply it is time is relative to the speed of the observer and what he is observing.

The effect that times seems to move quickly when you are feeling a certain way or have certain tasks to achieve is psychological. Einsteins theory is nothing to do with psychology.

Answer 7

The rate of passage of time depends on the speed of the object in question as per the theory of relativity. Since light must always travel at the speed of light, independant of the speed of the observer, the only way to satisfy this is for time to slow down as the speed of the observer approaches the speed of light.

Answer 8

The faster you move or the closer you get to the speed of light time seems to slow down around you, but you feel normal time.

Answer 9

Short sale comes from a shortage of the sales price to cover the mortgage liens on the property. A short sale is the process of getting approval from the lenders to accept a reduced payoff. In these cases both the borrower and the lending institution or institutions if there is more than one mortgage, has to approve the sale. The benefit to a short sale is that most often a borrower avoids pursuit by the lenders for default judgement- however specific language with this protection should accompany the short sale offer to the lender for the borrower protection. The second benefit is you avoid a foreclosure on your credit, however a short sale will often result in damaged credit as well.

Answer 10

In simple terms. "Time IS Relative to Mankind." It is not tangible. "Time IS Relevant only to Mankind as a tool of measurement." As is Mathematics.