Is it true the faster you travel?

Question

The slower time gets for the person travelling. Because so many people have told me this is ture. i.e. If someone travelled at the speed of light for 20 years and came back to earth they wouldn't have aged a bit.

Answer 1

Nobody here actually answer your question correctly.

First, you didn’t specify for whom the 20 years has passed by. So I’ll have to explain each case.

Second, you can not reach the speed of light. We can not prove it in practice (at least not yet), but we know it thanks to Einstein and many others equations.

Third, the faster you go, the slower time will be for you RELATIVE to others that are not moving at your speed, or in fact, that are moving at a slower speed than you.

With all this said, lets explain:

Time is related to space. As everything moves, each particle in the Universe has it own time. The faster your speed is in relation or relative to other things, the slower your time will be compared to the time to those other things that are not moving as fast as you are.

Contrary to most answers here, there has been in fact been proven in practice that time “slows down” when increasing speed. This has been seen by NASA by comparing the Atomic Clocks (the most accurate clocks we have ever made) in different points between one sitting on Earth and one sitting inside a satellite in orbit around Earth (it travels very fast completing many orbits in one day around the globe).

The time in the satellite gets out of sync from the one on Earth after months. Of course, the time difference is very small, thousands of a second, but if you wait long, maybe years, you will see a full second difference. In other words, the satellite is traveling to the future at a rate of maybe 1 second per 10 years or so.

Going to your question, lets assume we jump on a ship and start traveling at a high speed. Not light speed as we have said is not possible to reach (I won’t explain that here but you can look it up online), but maybe half the speed of light. That is very fast still.

Since there are two scenarios, lets see them separately:

Case one: for us, inside the ship, 20 years passed by. When we come back, on Earth there won’t be any of your friends anymore. I am not going to calculate it now, but I can tell you that over 1000 years would have passed by already.

Case two: for the people on Earth, the ship left and came back 20 years later. This is probably what you meat in your question. And yes, you and me would be almost the same age as we left, because for us, inside that ship, we only went for about one or two seconds, and came back.

Just to give you an idea, our Galaxy is about 100,000 light years in diameter. So, for us here on Earth, light will take 100,000 years to travel from one side to the other. A long time. But if we were able to go at almost the speed of light (again we can not get to that speed, only close to it), it would take us in our ship only about 40 years or so to travel from one side to the other.

Here on Earth it would have been over 100,000 years, but for us, is only half of our life, maybe 50 years the most and we got to see the entire galaxy.

It is the price we pay. If we ever come up with a high speed ship, we will be able to explore the galaxy very quick, but only for those in the ships, not for us here on Earth.

Hope this answers your question.

Answer 2

All I got was a speeding ticket and a court date for doing 90 on a 55 mph zone.

No one has proved whether you will get younger or time will stop or whatever. It is a theory. 20 years is 20 years, no matter how fast you travel. If time slows down while approaching the speed of light then at the speed of light there should be no time thus the speed of light cannot be measured using time.

Answer 3

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 4

Some years ago I left Exeter bus station on the Plymouth bus and it was a hot sunny day, You blond man gave me a ticket on the Plymouth bus the bus broken down for a short time and the man walked up stairs and shouted at the youths of stop smoking on my bus. The bus went off again driving very fast down to Plymouth and before I know it I was in Plymouth and thought this was quite quick as normally it takes 1 hour from Exeter. I walked around Plymouth and went into a Coffee Shop and looked at the Clock it was an hour early which I know in August we did not put the Clocks back and I ended up back in time an hour early. I was quite astonished how I did it.

Richard
Exeter UK

Answer 5

The effect is real. It is based on the experimental evidence that the speed of light is constant in all reference frames moving at uniform speed wrt a given reference frame.( It is obvious if you look at Maxwells equations for electromagnetism too). One of the consequences is time dilation ie observers moving relative to each other measure each others clocks (biological as well as mechanical/electronic) as 'ticking' at different rates. The relation is given by the LT =1/sqrt(1-v^2/c^2).
If you travelled away from earth at 0.866C decelerated and returned at that speed for a round trip of 50 of your years, earth time would have increased by 100 years. Plug the numbers in to check!

Answer 6

It has been proved that Einstiens theory of relatvity is correct. A series of experiments were done by NASA where they put an atomic clock in a fast aircraft and flew it around the world. The atomic clock on the plane registered a v. small minus difference to the stationary clock i.e. time slowed down!

Answer 7

It is true.

It has been proven by the use of identical calibrated Caesium clocks, one being taken for a ride in a jet and then compared afterwards. The clock that was in the jet was several thousandths of a second slower than the one left on the ground.

Answer 8

Just, one thing, you cant travel the speed of light. Although you can approach the speed of light. As you get closer to this speed time does technically slow down but it would hardly be noticibly until you are realatively close to it. this is called time dilation. This doesn't mean everything in time slows down thought, it is just the object moving at this high rate of speed who time slows. Here is a link to a site that has the time dilation equation if you would like to take a look. http://www.btinternet.com/~j.doyle/SR/Sr5/sr5.htm

Answer 9

That is so much hog wash...If they traveled for 20 years, at the very least, they would be 20 years older.

Answer 10

Regardless of scientists conclusions and answers which are mostly based on study, most of their answers seem to be theoretical basically a sugar coated guess on their own answers! My own personal opinion the speed of light what ever it's actual speed is recorded at will always be over zero of a second so if you travelled at any speed no matter how fast I think everything you left behind in youre travel would of aged only the time that you have left them for!