Time dilation, a two sided problem...?

Question

If someone is traveling at .99 the speed of light away from me, their time will move more slowly than my time, and their mass will increase.

But if they look at me, they think that MY mass has increased and my time is dilated.

What is going on? Serious answers please!

Thanks for any help you can give me.

Answer 1

There is nothing going on. You stay in your gravitation field, behaving according to the system you are in.

Your friend, moving very fast, might look at you and find that you are moving with his speed in opposite direction.

The movement is relative. Discussing a problem, you must decide which gravitation field you will calculate in. Discussing from your place: If you call up your friend with the mobile, it will take a long time before he answers, and you might not understand his talking. If you observe him you will find he is very short if he moves with the head in moving direction.

But the time goes on and you and your friend is getting older as you measure on your watch.

But if he look upon a watch on his hand, he establish another system, in his gravitation field. His watch will measure different from yours, probably slower because he need a big acceleration which influences on his gravitation field.

He might believe he is younger than you when he gets back.

But you have your watch, and you will protest.

Because time also is a relative unit.

Answer 2

Sorry, but the only serious answer I can give is that this is exactly what happens!

Most of the consequences of relativity are just fundamentally weird and difficult to grasp, but relativity states that you are both correct -- as long as you are both in inertial reference frames, you will both observe each other to obey the laws of physics. There is no absolute frame to tell you who is right.

Answer 3

What you have said is completely correct, as far as it goes. However, special relativity deals only with inertial (non-accelerating) frames, so in that case you will never meet again to compare notes!

The twin paradox (what you are describing) is resolved by noting that the frames of you and your travelling friend are not the same. To a close approximation, you would be in an inertial frame and your friend would be accelerating; hence the frames are not the same, and the symmetry of the time dilation is therefore not preserved. This happens basically if your friend goes away and comes back; there has to have been an acceleration totalling approximately 2c. This brings general instead of special relativity into play.

Hope this helps!

Answer 4

Yes - you are absolutely correct. That's special relativity - very freaky.

You have to remember that everything - EVERYTHING - that exists within the universe from planets right down to atoms, occupies it's own individual frame of reference. Something happening in one frame of reference does not necessarily happen in the other.

It sounds stupid, but if I sit on the sofa and you walk around the room, there's no way to determine who is moving and who is at rest. Put that out in the universe, taking away the room and the sofa, leaving us both floating in the ether - there is NO way whatsoever to determine who's stationary and who's moving.

So time is relative - not a universal constant as was previously though. Time moves at different rates depending on who's watching you and what their motion is.

That's why it's called relativity - everything is relative. The only constant thing is the speed of light (in a vacuum).

Weird and wonderful :-)

Answer 5

YOu would never see them and they would never see you.

For this to occur, you would have to be moving nearly as fast as they are, but by the formulae you have given, you are standing still. If the buildup to SLS is gradual, the effect would either be like waving goodbye to someone driving away in a car or being launched off a carrier deck. If the acceleration were instantaneous, they would literally be there one moment, then gone the next. If you were standing next to them when it happened, you would likely be slaughtered by the sonic concussion, so you wouldn't really see anything, would you? one has to abide by physical laws or alter the formula for your query to be valid. It's also a matter of the Quantum laws of motion, molecular cohesion and the probablility of SLS field manufacture in such a case. too many variables to consider, really, but the question was interesting.

Answer 6

It always depends on the observer and it's just like 'normal' time and space really. If you were standing still and another person running, you would think you would both be clear who was doing the moving. But it's only your brain telling you his legs are moving and yours aren't, and the ground changes under him and not under you, that tells you he is the one moving. In open space with no reference points you would not be able to tell which one of you was moving. So each observer near the speed of light ses himself as normal and the other as suffering the consequences