Thoughts on Relativity

Observations on Relativity

Take two twins and place one on a spaceship heading away from earth at .8c (80% of the speed of light). The principle of relativity will result in one twin aging faster than the other. The twin on the spaceship will experience time more slowly than the twin on earth. That is to say, the twin on the spaceship will age more slowly. The time on the spaceship will be called Ts and the time on Earth with be Te and V will be the speed of the spaceship as a fraction of the speed of light.

Ts = Te times the square root of (1 – V squared)

(note: my Office 2007 crashes when I try to insert an equation)

What this means is that the faster one travels, the slower the time (greater the time dilation). For example, if you travel to a galaxy four million light years away at just under the speed of light and then return, just over 8 million years will have passed. The closer you get to the speed of light, the closer you get to exactly 8 million years. Interestingly, the closer you get to the speed of light, the closer you get to zero passage of time on the spaceship.

Taken to the endpoint, this means that if you traveled at exactly the speed of light (achieving that speed instantaneously) zero time will have passed for the passengers on the spaceship. Now, there are some assumptions here. First of all, to attain the speed of light, you have to be massless to conform with E=MC^2, otherwise you would achieve infinite mass at light speed, an impossible assumption

Now…

Time times Speed = distance

I know this is Newtonian physics but it does apply (I think) to observers in the same frame of reference. A person on a space ship that sees zero time pass will also see zero distance covered by the space ship which is their frame of reference.

So, while on the ship, as time approaches zero, so does distance (look up relativity and simultaneously).

Someone on earth would see me move away at the speed of light, while I, on the photon, would feel no passage of time and would not, in fact, have moved at all.

This seems … unlikely. However, it seems that this is what relativity implies.

So now we go to Feynman’s comment on the double slit experiment. Maybe everything that can happen has happened. There are those that believe this is true. This is a concept as old as man and spirituality. Everything that can happen has happened and is happening right now all at once.

This all just occurred to me so I need to give it some more thought.