Can someone explain time dilation the simplest way possible?

can someone explain time dilation the simplest way possible?

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Every day you need to schedule a specific time to dilate your neo-vagina or it will heal over. This is known as your "dilation time"

It is a property of motion in spacetime that the 4-velocity squared has to always equal the speed of light squared. If you start changing your 3-velocity then then your "1-velocity" (time) has to "dilate" to maintain the normalization of the 4-velocity.

>normalization of the 4-velocity

what if you were to go faster than the speed of light?

Then you wouldn't be in spacetime so time dilation would be irrelevant.

Simplest possible clock: photon bouncing between parallel reflecting mirrors. Every time it hits mirror 1, a counter increments.
Imagine mirror-clock is spaceship moving past you. (You are on the ground.) Now, instead of light going up down up down, it follows a zig-zag path. There's a horizontal component added. The track it follows between successive "ticks" is now longer. Everyone measures the speed of light the same. If light is taking a longer path, the clock must "tick" less often. Simple geometry gives the correct answer.
Pilot of spaceship still sees light going up down up down. HIS clock is normal. It's the clocks on Earth, rushing backwards which are slowed.

Isn't the situation symmetrical? Surely both can't say the other clock is slow. But the only way to compare clocks on an even footing is for the spaceship to turn around and return to Earth. Then the clocks are side-by-side. But the turn means the spaceship is no longer in uniform motion; not in an inertial frame. That takes the problem out of Special Relativity and into General Relativity. One way of looking at it is that gravity slows time. (Experimentally measured.) The turnaround (whether by rockets or by hairpinning around a neutron star) is equivalent to plunging into a gravity field and having the spaceship clock reset.

A graphical way of seeing this is en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minkowski_diagram

Problem never arises since you CAN'T go faster than light. Any of the usual SF tropes such as hyperspace or space-warp lead to being able to send information backwards in time and this causes logical paradoxes. (You sent a message from Wednesday back to Monday, warning of the terrorist attack on Tuesday. Forewarned, the plot is foiled. No one was hurt and there's no need to send the message back to Monday. So who sent the message?)

>this causes logical paradoxes
why would physics care about logical paradoxes? you can't because you can't, not because something paradoxical would happen if you could

OP imagine it like this
you are A, you are at a velocity 0 relative to Earth (ie you're standing still)
above you flies a spaceship B that is going at let's say 80% speed of light, let's just assume it's a reasonable speed
when both A and B are aligned both flash a laser horizontally. what light wave do you think will reach the orange detector first?

Because logical paradoxes are telling you something is wrong with your theory or assumptions.
Assume big rocks fall faster than small pebbles.
How fast does a big rock taped to a small pebble fall? Faster than the big rock alone? At the speed of the pebble? Somewhere in-between?
Instead of glue, supposed they're just tied together with string? Lengthen the string. Reduce it to a thread. At what point does the system begin to behave like two separate bodies?
There's no good answer, so we reject the idea heavy objects fall faster.
There are no paradoxes in the real world!!!

What I was trying to state is that (most) people accept that you can't exceed lightspeed simply by leaving the rockets on. You can't because you can't.
But that alone would not rule out assorted fictional methods of circumventing the limit. Hyperspace. Just like any paper showing a method of trisecting an arbitrary angle using only compass and unmarked straight-edge goes straight into the wastebasket. You don't even take the time to read it to find the error.

>simplest terms possible
Turns out that no matter which way you go, no matter how fast you go, light is always moving precisely at C.This is known with a very high degree of certainty. If the speed doesn't change, that means mass, distance and time do.

Time dilation is just one curious result of that.

>Simple geometry gives the correct answer.
that makes a lot of sense. thanks.
i don't get it.

That's intuitionism and it's just plain wrong. Paradoxes are fine, it just means you have a void in your understanding. Imagine if the Pythagoreans thought that the sqrt(2) paradox meant that some square roots didn't exist, or something. Math, physics, etc. are way above human concepts such as paradoxesx

Can anyone explain neovagina dilation to me?

>Imagine if the Pythagoreans thought that the sqrt(2) paradox meant that some square roots didn't exist, or something.
lol

Both light beams will hit at the same time. But to the spaceship, which is moving together with the lightbeam, it still looks like the lightbeam is moving at the speed of light. That's the crucial part. No matter how fast you go, light always goes at C relative to you. This is experimentally proven.

So if the speed is unchanging, it must mean time and distance can change. In this case, time must be moving hell of a lot more slowly on the spaceship in order for him to perceive light as moving at c.

this is a troll

Hey, to them the idea that the square of 2 wasn't a rational number was even crazier than the grandfather paradox

>can someone explain time dilation the simplest way possible?
I'm pretty sure the twin paradox that accompanies any pop sci discussion is as good as it gets. I mean it's an example that even kids can understand.
I mean its almost as cliche as explaining how a worm hole works by folding a piece of paper and pushing a pen through it.

Well, the Greeks were wrong. It was almost a theological issue. We can construct a line square-root-two in length (in the ideal world of Euclid, anyway). So could the Greeks. And they knew they could.
They just freaked out after proving it couldn't be expressed as a rational number. Nothing paradoxical there. A paradox is a contradiction; an integer simultaneously odd AND even, a triangle with four sides, or a brand-new Platonic solid.

Correct. I'd quibble only with the wording "looks like the lightbeam is". It IS moving at cee, by anyone's measure. When you say "looks", people may claim it's some sort of illusion.

>didn't exist
define "exist". If you are a Pythagorean, a number exists if you can express it as the ratio of two natural numbers.

All we've really done since then is shrug and say "lol, whatever, this shit is convenient". Same with 0. Same with negative numbers. Same with imaginary numbers.

No. He's right. Maybe he should have put both question and answer in a single post.
But what he says is what does happen.
is a troll.

sure, though it would be difficult to prove that its actually the simplest way possible

>the grandfather paradox
Not really a paradox so much as it is an easy way to identify what time travel-rules your universe has.