Quote:
Originally Posted by Mike33
The part I don't get is how does one know this? How does one come to accept the statement as a given or truth. Was it first conceived from a mathematical proof or equation?
|
It's been proven with partical accelerators where they accelerate a radioactive particle and measure the halflife decay of the material to gauge how much 'time' has passed. They have also done experiments with atomic clocks in high speed aircraft where the ones in the planes tick 'slower' than the ones on the ground.
Quote:
It's been years since I took Grade 12 Algebra & Geometry and when I did, I got a C+ grade in it, lol. Mind you, I was a slacker. I have no recollection of what a vector is and how to apply it here
|
= = = = = = => turns into
= =>
You shrink, but only relative to the direction that you're going. Note that the width remains the same, only the length changes (attempting to do this with a 2d model so work with me ;) )
Quote:
If a vector is a straight line, I agree you shrink as you pass an observer. This happens when a car passes you and it gets smaller the further away it gets from you.
|
No that's just a matter of distance, what I'm talking about is an object actually getting smaller (again only from the point of view of an observer) depending on the speed at which it's traveling. If you could hypothetically take a picture of a car moving near the speed of light as it passed you even ten feet away it would be about as wide as a pin viewed from the side.
(ie you're looking this way at the road the car was traveling on -> || )
Quote:
Ok I'll accept that. I still just don't grasp how that relates to time.
|
It doesn't other than the fact that according to this theory both are variables which are dependant on our velocity and therefore relative to other moving bodies.