Does time really slow down as you approach

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Does time really slow down as you approach the speed of light? Certain experiments have apparently confirmed time dilation. Did time actually slow down or did only the clocks slow down? I have read where some people have said that the speed of the aircraft only affected how fast the clocks moved. That time went by at the same speed as where the stationary clocks were.

Last edited by Jetso on 10 Oct 2020, 12:54 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I know that time does slow down as you approach retirement age...

In physical science, time is the operation of clocks. There is no kind of time or concept of time other than what clocks measure. The abstract concept of time we use in everyday speech is not a part of physical science because it's not physical: it can't be measured and it isn't really useful as part of physical science.

So whenever you read about time slowing down in the context of physical science, yes, it means that whatever time-measuring device the experimenters used operated in such a way that whatever time periods the device measures took longer to transpire than they did outside the conditions of the experiment.

Keep in mind, however, that living bodies can act as clocks as well. It's possible to roughly gauge how much time has passed by the physical aging of some living thing. And things like your heart beating more slowly due to working against a higher gravity (high-gravity situations also produce time-dilation effects, according to General Relativity), can give you a subjective sense of time passing more slowly.

So the point is that time dilation, even though it's all about clocks, goes beyond the traditional idea of a clock and is therefore in some sense more objective or pervasive than just clock-hands moving more slowly.

I don't know the details of these time dilation experiments, so I can't confirm whether it's legitimate to interpret the experimental results as confirmation of time dilation. I know only that time dilation, as a concept of physical science, is 100% about the operation of clocks and not about any abstract or commonsense concept of time.

If you were capable of traveling at the speed of light (or nearly the speed of light), stationary beings such as those on Earth, would measure the length of time you were gone as having been much longer than the amount of time you experienced during the journey.

This explanation may be better than my words:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/phys.org/news/2011-01-astronomy-telescope-.amp

The clock experiment you mentioned (I believe this one: https://www.google.com/amp/s/phys.org/news/2011-01-astronomy-telescope-.amp )



The findings are solid enough that satellites are engineered to compensate for it:

http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~pogge/Ast162/Unit5/gps.html#:~:text=Special%20Relativity%20predicts%20that%20the,their%20relative%20motion%20%5B2%5D.

In a building with clocks in the rooms where the clock in one of the rooms is broken the clock in that room may be moving slower than the clocks in all the other rooms, but it doesn't mean that time is going by slower in the room with the slower clock than in the rest of the building. Time is going by at the same speed throughout the building. The clock in that room is faulty.

^ The clocks referred to and used in the aforementioned study are not analog or digital clocks like we typically use on a daily basis. In the quote I posted above you'll see that the 'clock' used in the experiment is actually much different.

I never said or implied that it meant that. The concept of time dilation does not mean that clocks running slower than other clocks implies differential velocity.

Jetso, you seem to be over-thinking the subject; apparently without having really studied it.  Time dilation is a difference in the elapsed time as measured by two clocks due to the existence between them of a relative velocity between their locations.  The formula...

... expresses the concept in mathematical terms, where v is the velocity of an object in meters per second relative to an observer, and c is the speed of light in a vacuum -- specifically, 299,792,458 meters per second -- a constant value for the observer no matter how fast the observer may be going.

Do the maths.

It really is about the passing of time, not some mechanical effect sabotaging the clock. The clocks are hypothetical, perfect clocks. Clocks are used in explanations of time dilation for layfolk like us, because we humans don't have a better way of percieving exact lengths of time.

An astronaut watching a clock in a spaceship accelerating to relativistic speeds would not percieve the tick of the clock to be slowing down. Their perception of time would keep pace with the clock- from their point of view, the clock is ticking at the normal speed. But when they got home and compared notes with a person sat in Ground Control who has also been watching a clock the whole time, the spaceship clock would say that less time has passed than the ground control clock does. And the astronaut will have experienced less time passing than the Ground Control guy.

Time seems relative more with age than with speed through space. Time seems to speed up when people get older.