Who understands Einstein's theory?
 

I've never studied Einstein or his theories but I know about the time travel one where supposedly if you travel fast enough time doesn't pass by as fast. Anybody understand this theory and can explain it in laymens terms?

What difference does it make how fast you travel, time still clicks the same for you. You just reach your destination faster.

???

Theory of relativity where (in laymans terms) is if you travel at the speed of light, time stays still.

According to Einstein (and he was famous for coming up with theories like this that no one could disprove) is if you travelled from earth to some other planet at the speed of light, even if it took 10 years, you would be no older.

This has confused the 'illogical set' no-end for years, but if you looked at it logically, it is bullshit. Time can be measured from the time you are born. If you all of a sudden jump on a spacecraft, travel to another planet that took 2 years, you are still older in relationship to when you were born.

Einstein also worked on the nuclear bomb that was dropped on Japan. He was only a bit player in the team. I remember reading about Einstein being asked if it was feasible in approx. 1938. He said it was impossible and couldn't happen. He was sadly lacking in this regard. I'm from german heritage, but have no time for his theories.

Lyn from Oz

Are you asking pornographers about science? :)

Wow thanks Lyn.

I've never understood why traveling at the speed of light has anything to do with how much you age. In this theory, what's so special about the speed of light that gives it the supernatural property of keeping you from aging? Even if something was a trillion times faster than light why would that have any effect on time and age? It just means you get from point A to point B a trillion times faster than if you were traveling at the speed of light.

I thought your age changed relative to everyone else's like if you traveled the speed of light for 10 years, it won't be that you didn't age at all. You will have aged 10 years, but everyone back at earth might have aged 50 years.

Am I wrong about this?

I love to see real evidence. theory is not so interesting for me

i'm agin..
i got the brakes full on...
...damn...

Any time you travel faster, you have greater mass. Things with greater mass slow time down. Time is faster on airplanes then at the ground. It is measurable but obviously very small in change.

By using higher velocities you could move forward in time. Or by living near very large masses, black holes, suns, etc.

special relativity says that the passage of time is dependent on your speed. And this has been tested, they flew a plane the opposite direction of the earth rotation and when it landed its atomic clock was slightly different from the clock on land.

*part* of this is at the speed of light time would stand still for this person, but it's *RELATIVE* of course time would have passed for those on earth because they're travelling at a different speed.

Famous Albert Einstein Quotes

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."

"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one."

"A person starts to live when he can live outside himself."

"Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing."

"Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new."

"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."

"Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding."

"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."

"The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing."

"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe."

"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."

"My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind."

"The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking...the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker."

"You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat."

"Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."

"A human being is a part of a whole, called by us _universe_, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."

Interesting. But why would mass have anything to do with slowing time?

Has this test been replicated?

never understood it, never will

yep and in fact without accounting for it would cause all sorts of problems.

"These days, when atomic clocks are transported by air from Washington, D.C., to Boulder, Colorado, as part of the regular maintenance of the United States time standard, corrections are made for the time dilation based on a log of the flight with records of ground speed and elapsed time. Similarly, in the satellitebased GPS that represents the current state of the art in navigation, corrections are made for the effect of time dilation on the atomic clocks orbiting in satellites whose time signals form the basis for the system.

If time dilation were somehow turned off, not only would particle physics experiments shut down, but the most advanced navigational systems for both military and civilian needs would fail to operate. Aircraft and missiles, ships and submarines, trucks and trains, and hikers and hunters with their consumer-market GPS systems would literally lose their bearings"

youse guys all sound sober..

Einstein never worked on the atomic bomb and was a pacifist at heart, On August 2nd 1939 after a meeting that Einstein had with Physicist leo Szilard, Einstein on Szilards response signed a letter that was addressed to Roosevelt. The
full excerpt of the letter you can find here http://www.dannen.com/ae-fdr.html. several months later after war broke when Germany invaded poland, Einstein signed a second letter
that was sent to the president and the "manhattan project" was born

Einstein had postulated several theories in 1905 namely special and general relativity. Special relativity states Special relativity considers that observers in inertial reference frames, which are in uniform motion relative to one another, cannot perform any experiment to determine which one of them is "stationary". This is known as the principle of relativity.

Einsteins theory of relativity was proved in the 60's with the use of Atomic clocks.

That's fascinating. I wonder if there are any competing theories to explain time dilation.

If find it very fascinating that gravity dilatates time, but knowbody exactly knows what "gravity" really is....

There is one guy who travelled in time already, its an astronaut from Russia. Cant remember his name, I recommend the latest discovery special on timetravel where a professor is building a time machine. Scary stuff.

wtf?! am i still in gfy? :1orglaugh

I'm going to have to do my own reading on this, LOL. At present, this is completely over my head. I still don't understand the explanation given in this thread:

more mass + high velocity = travelling forward in time

But apparently it's been shown to be true with time dilation effects. Amazing.

I suggest picking up richard feynmans lectures on physics (audio book or real book) and learning from a real physicist instead of self proclaimed scientists at gfy

and yes he breaks it down in laymens terms and you do not need math to understand even thogh you will never understand it completly without math.

Ok ill try an ass simple explanation:
When you travel at the speed of light or close to it, relative to standing object your time runs slower.
They key is point is RELATIViTY. whats so hard about this?
Try to play with the Schroedinger equation that shit will make your head explode. Thats what I am studing now in my 400 level biochem and chem courses.

Time is a concept created by man.

In theory,if you can travel at 2X the speed of light, you should be able to go to a specific destination, turn right around and pass through the image of yourself going to your original destination. Thats pretty f'ed up. This is what quantum physics is trying to demonstrate by stating that the same particles can exist simultaneously. If this is true, which they seem to have proven now, then E=MC2 is merely an equation that will be disproven at some point. If it is possible to be in 2 places at the same time, then what is time really? A Manmade illusion.

First off there are two theories of relativity: special and general. In the broadest sense special relativity deals with space and time in the absence of gravity, while general deals with time and space as having curvatures that produce gravity.

Second, general relativity and quantum mechanics are two completely different things and when combined provide useless results, like location probabilities that approach infinity.

Anybody with a high school math education knows that a probabliity cannot be greater than one, let alone infinite, which is why the collision of quantum mechanics and general relativity has spawned M-Theory.

Time is relative depending upon your position within it.

IE: If you travel from earth to a planet that takes 10 years at the speed of light. You will only age 10 years from the perspective of your place in time.

However, because space and distance decrease in accordance to speed. Although you perspective of the passage of time for you is normal. To an observer still on earth the passage of YOUR time can be drastically different and vice versa.

Therefore the passage of time is subjective and depends on where it is being perceived.

Modern telescopes use this principle to a certain extent. The futher you look into space the further you look down the timeline. This is how we are able to see evidence of the BIG BANG.

You use the term "relative" and somebody else used the term "subjective". Are these terms interchangeable when explaining this?

Everybody keeps saying that when you travel at the speed of light, your time runs slower but nobody here has explained why. What was this hypothesis derived from? A mathematical formula? Did it come from experiments with light?

The passage of time is abslolute isn't it? The only thing that changes is our method or scale use for measuring it? For example, everything has a length but you might say something is 3 feet and I would say it's one meter. The scale is different but the length we're speaking about is the same and is absolute. The same is true for the passage of time, no?

Yes, even better IMO are Stephen Hawkings' documentaries. Very, very interesting.

Actually accourding to the TOR nothing with any mass could ever actually go the speed of light. You're only looking at one of three facets of the theory when you make that statement. :2 cents:

That's not what it says at all. The idea is that from the point of view of the person traveling near the speed of light time is actually passing slower. Say you took a ten year journey at those speeds, in the ten years you traveled 1,000 years could have passed on earth.

This has been at least supported with particle accelerator.

Not really, the idea is that from the point of view of one observer it would be happening one way and from the point of view of another observer it is happening another way. Both point of views are different, but also correct. The idea of different but equally true realities shows up all over quantum physics, look at some stuff like superposition theory and you'll see the same concepts re-emerge.

How would that even make sense. That would be incredible..

Isn't time a true concept apart from man, but our tools to measure or "control" it the only man made part of it? we measure it in seconds, minutes, hours, but even if we didn't time would still be passing us. Even if no clocks or no means to measure time existed you and I would grow old over the course of time.

The simple answer is no, it's completly relative.

Keep in mind mike that the reason time seems absolute is because there's no feasible way for a person to travel at a speed that would provide a realitive viewpoint that is significantly different from anyone else's. A clock works because in the grander scheme of things it's traveling at about the same speed I am.

damn, i am sure i was surfing gfy...

:1orglaugh

Nice to see such a conversation on gfy.

There still is that quirky little issue of needing an infinite fuel source. It is sort of a circular argument and problem. To move any mass to the speed of light you would need an absurd amount of fuel. This fuel would have weight (mass) and therefore you would need even more fuel to cover the weight of the fuel, and well more weight for that fuel and so on.

i am not a scientist at all, i am just enjoying this thread, very very interesting.

isnt it that you cannot travel the speed of light because the faster you go the more gravity is pushing on you? so you slow down the faster you go?

can someone explain if this is true? (i may have not stated it proper)

Hehe exactly, that's why in theory nothing with mass could ever do it. As you approach the speed of light your mass increases and thus the energy required for accelaration increases ad infinum.

Einstein was wrong.

E=mc3

So when it all comes down to it, this is just an interesting theory? It's an example of abstract mathematics with no real world merit? I was going to post earlier that even though we're able to calculate things happening on pen and paper using mathematic logic, the real world has checks and limits on such things. If we were to travel at the speed of light, would we not disintegrate and would the craft we were flying in not disintegrate too because of the heat it would cause?

But there must be more to this since it's been studied and talked about for years. It must have some application somewhere?

Wow, that is just completely wrong.