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April 13, 2013

Q.According to relativity Moving clock ticks slow..i have 2 much confusion to understand this statement as well time dilation

Savera asked:
Q.According to relativity Moving clock ticks slow..i have 2 much confusion to understand this statement as well time dilation

 Answer:Sure let us consider that You are "at rest", and there's a rocket going past you, and a person on the rocket is holding a clock, a flashlight, and a meter stick oriented in the direction of travel. You also hold a clock, a flashlight, and a meter stick.

You see a one-meter-long stick, and a clock ticking at one tick per second, and you see the light traveling at the speed of light.


The person on the rocket also sees his stick as one meter long, the clock ticking at one tick per second, and the light traveling away at the speed of light.


But, when you look at the rocket, you see a meter stick that is shorter than a meter, and a clock that is ticking slower than one tick per second, but the light from the flashlight is still traveling at the speed of light. 


It turns out that the person on the rocket sees the same thing when he's looking at you. The stick is short, the clock is slow, but the light is traveling at the speed of light. What this means is that either frame can be the "rest" frame, and the other would be the "moving" frame, so there is no absolute reference frame, so everything is relative.


Note, the differences are extremely small unless the "rocket" is moving at a significant fraction of the speed of light. So in your example, there's hardly anything to notice. But if flashlight is moving at, say, 0.5c, both you and the moving observer see the light traveling at the speed of light, but you would see the meter stick as 0.866 meters long, and each second on the moving clock would take 1.15 seconds of your time.


This may all seem counterintuitive, since you're accustomed to speeds adding arithmetically. However, the above describes how the universe actually works.



Also understand that we measure time with electron clock in which an electron is emmited from a surface and when it comes back it is regarded as one second.so when a body travels at a speed near to speed of light then it will take a larger time to come back...so time moves slow.  (as shown in the figure above)

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