Does this disprove relativity: "you don't age because you're travelling away at lightspeed", but....

Question

Aren't you travelling TO somewhere at the same speed? Wouldn't that balance it out????

Answer 1

In physics, the twin paradox refers to a thought experiment in Special Relativity, in which a person who makes a journey into space in a high-speed rocket will return home to find they have aged less than an identical twin who stayed on Earth. This result appears puzzling, since the situation seems symmetrical, as the latter twin can be considered to have done the travelling with respect to the former. Hence it is called a "paradox". In fact, there is no contradiction and the apparent paradox is explained within the framework of relativity theory and has been verified experimentally using precise measurements of clocks flown in airplanes.

Answer 2

Both an observer in front of you and an observer behind you would come to the conclusion that your clocks where running slower than theirs if they measured signals they each received from you.

They wouldn't "see" the same thing, though. If you sent off regular beeps or flashes of some kind, the observer behind you would see them spread out in time because each would travel a longer distance than the previous one. The forward observer would see them come in rapid succession because the distances would be getting progressively shorter.

Both observers know about this "time of flight" issue for the light, however. It's after they compensate for it in their calculations that they'll come to the conclusion your clocks are running slower than theirs.

The weird thing about relativity is that if you observe signals from the other two observers you'll come to the conclusion that their clocks are also running slower than yours!

It seems utterly crazy that yours is slower than theirs and theirs are slower than yours. The most satisfying analogy that makes some sense of this is one I read in David Griffiths' electrodynamics book. He says if two cars meet on the highway and each driver looks in his rear view mirror, both cars seem to be getting smaller as they move apart. There's no contradiction there.

Answer 3

First of all you, as a hunk of mass, can't travel at light speed.

The best explanation I know of came from one of Physicist Brian Greene's books. We are all going through spacetime at the speed of light. This is easy to imagine if you are sitting still and time is going by as usual. The harder part to imagine is when you are moving through space, time is going slower so that the overall spacetime remains the same. As you approach moving through space near (but can't quite reach) the speed of light, the time portion of spacetime slows to keep your perception of spacetime exactly the same.

Thus, if you move through space at say, 1/2 the speed of light, spacetime in total stays the same for you, but time is cut in 1/2.

The TO and FROM don't change anything or balance out anything.

Answer 4

You do age, but compared to the rest of your universe it is nothing. Like our lives seem long, but they are gone instantly almost when you look at things in the span of the universe. I'm not sure if you understand my answer at all, or if I get your question lol. But no, you are not disproving relativity, because it doesn't actually claim that we don't age.

Answer 5

You know it all has to do with your clock's frame of reference. You are sitting at your computer at rest with the room. So is the clock with which your time frame is being measured. But you are on the rotating earth traveling at nearly 1000 miles per hour about its axis. The earth in turn is orbiting the sun at about 29.8 km/s. The sun and its neighbors in the Milky Way Galaxy are moving 1.34 million miles per hour (600 km/s) are moving in the direction of the Constellation Hydra and so on.
We measure our age here on earth with clocks in our frame of reference.

Answer 6

Relativity states the, "As matter aapproaches the speed of light mass a pproaches infinity and the matter shrinks in the the direction of motion, at light speed it vanishes and becomes light." You are wrong.

Answer 7

Oh, gee, why didn't Einstein think of that? Nobel prize, here you come!