How does approacing the speed of light slow time?

Answer 1

Everything is relative and time is also relative.

Light is the fastest speed in Universe

If you travel faster than light then you are surpassing the boundaries of normal existence

All the creation is in motion with a certain speed. Speed is the criteria of motion. Thus the fastest motion is directly related to the fastest speed which is speed of light.

At the speed of light the motion is fastest and surrounding apparently stands, as it is relatively slower than light.

The time factor is the passing of object from one location to other .

At almost the speed of light, all other objects moving slower appears to be deceleration or coming to a virtual halt, giving an impression of time being slowed down.


If you could travel with a seed of light for one year and return to your original base you will be surprised to know that 1000 of years have passed, but you have grown old by one year only.

The speed travel slows down the time and covers incredibly large distances.

The faster you travel the slower the time becomes. At speeds higher then speed of light the time goes into negative, meaning that you can travel into past at higher speed of light and can chose your past regulating the light speed factor.

Answer 2

That's the kind of question that really takes about a year of College Physics (in Special Relativity) to answer. The short answer is that light always travels at the same speed no matter -what- your inertial frame of reference is. And, as a result of this, if your reference frame accelerates to near light speeds ('relativistic' speeds) then your time reference slows down with respect to the rest of the UNiverse. Things seem perfectly normal to you, but when you slow down and return, you'll find that a lot more time has passed for the rest of the Universe than for you. If you're speed is v and the speed of light (3x10^8 m/s) is c then the apparent change is √(1-(v²/c²)) so as you approach c, time runs slower and slower.
And yes, this has been measured many thousands of times. It's not a theory, it's an observable, verifiable fact.

Doug

Answer 3

Assume that the speed of light is constant. Then the most perfect clock imaginable is a pair of mirrors, one above the other, with a light beam bouncing between them. If the mirrors are 1/2 light-second apart, then the beam of light returns to the lower mirror once a second. Note that this clock is perfect, perfect, perfect, and any other clock would be merely an approximation of the correct time as shown on the light clock.

Make two identical light clocks. You stay on Earth with one of them, and put the other (and a grad student) into a rocket ship moving uniformly at high speed horiontally. As measured by you, the rocket clock's light flash has a longer distance to travel than your light flash, because it must move in a zigzag motion to keep hitting the horizontally moving mirrors. But the rocket's light flash is moving at exactly the same speed as your light flash: the speed of light, c. Longer distance and same speed means that it will take longer for the rocket's flash to return to the bottom mirror than yours. Therefore you observe the rocket clock to run slower than yours. Since the light clock on the rocket runs slow, so do all the other clocks on it (such as the atomic clock, the grad student's biology, etc) because they all merely approximate the running of the perfect light-flash clock.

Of course, your grad student sees her clock running normally (it's at rest relative to her) and your clock running slow (it's in motion).

You can do a similar experiment with a momentarily stationary but accelerating light-clock to show that it runs slow as well, thus showing that gravitation slows time because gravitation and acceleration are indistinguishable.

David Mermin's "Space and Time in Relativity" is a good place to start with this stuff.

Answer 4

This a tricky question to answer. Time is defined as an interval between events. as matter approaches the speed of light, mass approaches infinitely and time approaches zero. As mass approaches infinity the amount of space within the matter of the mass becomes very restricted due to the packing together of particles, events become slower in frequency because movement is severely restricted, under these conditions time dilates, stretches, it takes longer to move through time. These are conditions that exist in a black hole where matter is so densely packed there is no room for movement, therefore no events can take place, no events, time stops.

Answer 5

Let's say the speed of light was 1m/s. If you were running away from me at 1m/s and holding up a red sign every second, by the the time 2 seconds have passed, you would be 2 meters away, yes? If you held up a red sign at that time, it would take another 2 seconds for the light (traveling at 1m/s) to travel back to me to see you holding it, therefore what you see as taking you just 2 seconds, i see as taking you 4 seconds. It's relative.