Time Dilation Explained!

TIME DILATION
You hear people saying ‘time slows down’ or ‘time speeds up’; ‘You can travel back into your past’ or ‘you can time travel to your future’ and blah blah time time. Or you might have seen the movie Interstellar and was like ‘Ohh! No way! That’s not possible’ or ‘But how?’ or ‘No, he can’t get younger than his daughter!’

You wanna know how? I shall tell you.

The thing is, when you travel faster, time slows down for you. Time is relative. As beautifully explained by Einstein, for a man sitting with a pretty girl, an hour seems like a minute, and for him sitting on a hot stove, a minute seems more than an hour.

It is a fact! Can’t accept it?

Consider, a photon trapped perpendicularly in between two parallel mirrors. It bounces off from one to the other, continuously.

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The yellow dot is the photon, and its motion is depicted by the arrowheads. ‘d’ is the distance travelled by the photon from one mirror to the other.

Consider the speed of the photon in this case.
Speed s = distance d/ time


Now, imagine that you are travelling with this setup (people call it light clock), at a high speed in a spaceship. Or if you don’t wanna travel in a spaceship, well, umm.. uk, it doesn’t matter how you travel. You travel, just that.

Okay. how will the diagram be like now?
Yeah, you see that here. The distance d has changed, now. Now if we calculate the speed,
s = d0 / time  (d0 = the distance d here)

Study the two cases. The distance changes. What happens, then?
The speed s changes.
But, what have we learnt of the speed of light? Yeah, yes, it is a constant. How can a constant value change? NO WAYYYY!
At the same time, there’s no doubt that the distance has a change in both case. What should that mean? Simple, time changes. What else is there to change?

That’s it. Time dilation explained! Time changes with speed.

Can’t really accept it, still?

We have experimental proofs as well. (You may google about its authenticity yourself, in case of any doubts)

When two watches were synchronised, and one watch travelled at very high speed for a long time and was back to ground, there was a slight difference in the time of those two watches. The one which stayed stationary showed a time slightly more than the other. The change can be prominent only when we travel faster to the speed of light.

Ohhhhh! That’s it, that’s it!

~ Echo Delta John

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