Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseWhy does time slow down when you go fast?
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Hey, Daniel, do you somebody's feel when you're bored time slows down?
That never happens to me when I'm talking to you, or Hey, every conversation with.
You is riveting, It goes back to super fast.
That's right. Time just flies by, you know, I call you up and then all of a sudden, it's hours later.
Do you know what I mean? Like, it's the idea that maybe time is relative in our heads.
No, I think that's true. When you're waiting for something, time feels like it goes really slow. When you're listening to your favorite podcast hosts, it just is right, Behy, we're pretty bad at measuring time as a species.
Are we really? Like? Our brains are not good at estimating time?
Oh?
Yeah.
They do all these experiments where they ask people to estimate how long something has been and they always over underestimate it.
Oh wow. So psychologically time can be relative, that's proven. But what about physics can that actually happen?
Yeah, it turns out that physics also doesn't provide a bedrock layer of truth that time can slow down.
Huh. So there's no universal clock like, there's no impartial, godlike measure of time.
That's right. So if next time you're late for a meeting, you can just say, hey, I got my own clock and my observer says that was on time. Physics gives you an excuse to be late for your meeting. Hi'm Horget and I'm Daniel.
Welcome to our podcast Daniel and Jorgete explain the universe.
In which we take plenty of time to explain to you how time works in the universe.
Hey, yeah, we're here to help you. Whatever it is you're doing, commuting to work, on a subway, going out for a jog. We're here to help the time move a little bit faster for you.
That's right. We're here to kill some time for you.
And now it's time to get on with it. So today's topic is why do clocks run slower when they are moving fast.
That's right. This is a really popular thing for people to get confused about in relativity. M hm. It's technically called time dilation, the fact that clocks that move fast run slow, and it's a topic that confuses people from here to infinity.
Yeah, it's the idea that if you're going really fast, maybe at close up the speed of light, then time slows down for you.
That's right. And the thing we want to understand today is not just does it happen, but why does it happen? What is it about the universe that makes that the way it really works? And the thing that I love about this is that it's one of the best examples of how the universe doesn't work the way you think it does, that it doesn't make sense to our sort of intuitive understanding of the way the world should.
Work, especially at these extreme conditions.
Right. That's right, because we're not used to those extreme conditions. So we've operated in on the surface of the Earth, which is pretty slow speeds for thousands and thousands of years. We build up these intuitive models for how we think the universe behaves, right, what the rules are, And one of those rules is that we think that there is a absolute history, right, we think that there is a reality out there and that something actually happens, and in the end everybody should agree if they're honest observers about what happened. It turns out that's just not true.
And hopefully this is kind of a topic that a lot of people have hopefully, I think, and maybe have heard about. It's sort of permeated out into popular culture a little bit, right, Like it's the basis of the movie Interstellar.
I knew you were going to talk about Interstellar interstellar reference.
But it's a big example of it in pop culture, right. I think, really Interstellar was a pretty big movie, regardless of what your physicists thinks of it.
Am I ear a physicist? Is that how you refer to me? No, Interstellar actually did a pretty good job of modeling the relativity portion. My issues with the Interstellar are more about the time travel and going inside a black hole. But from the point of view of relativity, that made a lot of sense. I mean, I thought it was good that they actually built into the plot what would happen to various people's clocks, And that's the key thing, is that relativity is all about comparing clocks. How fast is my clock going to you compared to your clock?
So we're going to assume that you have heard of this concept that if you are in a spaceship going really fast, then time will slow down for you. But we were wondering how many people out there know why?
So, as usual, I torture the undergraduates of UC Irvine by walking around and asking them random questions without any preparation. And remember, for those of you who think that these answers are silly, these are hard questions to answer on the top of your head, so give them some slack.
It's torture. The HEIA calls it physics.
Sporting enhanced physics exactly, physics borting, Yeah, exactly. I'm going to cover your face with a towel and pour physics on your face. Eventually, I think the undergrads are going to recognize me, and they're gonna be like, don't let that guy talk to you. He'll embarrass you.
Run away.
We're not trying to embarrass these people.
No, it's great. I think I would be totally flabbergasted if you asked me these questions out on the street.
All right, I'll plan the ambush you one day, so before you listen to these answers, think for yourself. Do you know what time dilation is? Can you explain why moving clocks run more slowly?
Here's what people have to say.
Have you heard of time dilation?
Yeah?
Do you know that clocks that move really fast go slower?
No?
This is fining your information to me.
Yes.
Do you know why that is?
No?
I don't know the real reason.
No, I'm sorry.
Okay, no, no, okay, there is no time?
Okay, thanks very much.
All right, So maybe I was a little wrong. Not a lot of people have heard about this concept.
That's right, and there are even people out there that deny the time exists. Right, there is no time.
That was my favorite away, there is no concept of time, or that there was not enough time to explain it to you.
You know, I was so flabbergasted by the response. I couldn't even formulate a follow up question. I was just like still processing, Like, what does that even mean? Wow?
Did he just dropped or she dropped the bike? There is no time, straight phase.
She said it with a lot of finality. Yeah, so there wasn't a whole lot of opening there for interrogation or follow up questions. I was like, this is a clearly known fact, there is no time.
Well, she was just in a rush and she's like, I have no time for this.
No, I think it was definitely more of the time and time is an illusion, so an answer.
Yeah, I've heard of that time is an illusion.
Yeah, well, I think we have to do a whole other podcast episode about what is time and how does it work? And why does it only go forward and all that kind of stuff.
But this is kind of related. This topic is related to that idea that time is not what we think it is.
That's right. We've made a lot of progress in the last one hundred years in understanding time, and we've connected it to space. You've probably heard the concept of space time, right. We have three dimensions at least of space and one dimension of time, and Einstein's relativity tied them together and showed us how time and space are connected. But that doesn't mean that time can be simply understood as a fourth dimension of space. It's much more complicated. It's different from the other dimensions of space.
Yeah, they're all tied together, time, speed, space, It's all one big molasses of a universe.
It's all one big tangle The amazing thing is that it actually all does work. You know, we have this new version of our understanding of the universe, not that new anymore, as one hundred years old, but this revived version of our understanding of the universe, and it actually hangs together. I mean, the answers it gives you don't make any sense to your intuition, Like they fly in the face of what you think should happen. They require you to like throw out the way you think the universe works. But they actually do hang together mathematically and they are correct. Like every time we make a ridiculous prediction from relativity and go out and check it, the universe is like, yep, that ridiculous thing actually happens.
Well, let's break it down for people. So what does it mean for clocks to run slower when they move fast? So that's what we're exploring, and that's what we're trying to explain, is why when you're moving really fast, your clock is going to actually slow down.
Right, And so let's be very careful on how we say this because a lot of people get confused. People think that if you are moving fast that your clock slows down, that like if you're looking at your watch and running that you can see the seconds tick slower. That's not true. If you're holding a clock and the clock is not moving relative to you, you'll always see it moving at one second per second. Okay, No matter how fast you're going relative to anything else, your clock always runs the same way.
It sound like I get on a spaceship, hit the warp speed, and thenoo, that's not what I experience.
That's right. You never notice your own time changing, right, You experience time at one second per second, no matter what. Okay, The thing that does happen is that clock's moving relative to you. Right. So, if I'm standing still and Horror has a clock and he runs, because he's a pretty zippy guy, if he runs it half the speed.
Of plight because I'm running late, probably.
If I notice that he's moving really fast, then I will see his clock running more slowly. Right. So, now, from his point of view, he will see his clock running normally, but I will see his clock running more slowly.
If I'm zooming past you and you just look at my clock as I'm zooing by, it's not going to be running at the same speed as your clock.
That's right. If I'm watching you as you go by, and I'm watching your clock's hands tick forward. Right, Then they don't agree with mine. Yours mark the seconds more slowly than my clock does.
Whoa.
And that's the key thing, is that the observation of time depends on your relative velocity to the clock.
Hmm. So it's not that it actually slowed down for me at least, it just you saw it run slower.
Right. I love how you try to use the word actually right, because you're you're imagining there's some true version of the effect of the effect, right, I'm just this is an illusion or it looks this way, but it's not actually happening. The problem is there is no what actually happened. Okay, I observe one thing, you observe something else. We can both be right even if those accounts disagree.
Whoa. Okay. So then I'm running past you really fast with a clock and you see it run slower than I do, or it's running slower than your clock. Then what happens if I stop, Like, if I stop a few paces after you, does that mean our clocks are going to be out of sync?
Yes, our clocks will definitely be out sink exactly, and there's a lot of interesting effects there. Right. So I'm standing still from my point of view, right, then you're running past me. I see your clock moving more slowly. I see my clock running normally. Right, what do you see? Well, you see your clock running normally, right, because everybody sees their own clock running normally. But you also see my clock running slowly because even though you're due one doing the running, I'm moving relative to you and your clock.
So then what happens is if I stop, because I'm going to think time move normally, but when I compare my clock to your clock, your clock will have skipped ahead because right or no, you'll have skip back.
This is really tricky, okay, and we should probably avoid this topic. Well maybe we won't. Let's dig into it. This is called the twin paradox, right. This is people say, well, how do you reconcile this? Right? So the classic framing of this is, say we're twins, right, and I stay on We Dross draws for Hugus to go to Alpha Centari and you lose. So you have to go to Alpha Centari or you win. You have to go to Alpha Centari. I stay on Earth and you take a rocket ship to office Centari, and I see your clock running more slowly.
Okay, well we sink first of all, we sink clocks like before I take off.
First of all.
Yes, we're just gonna sink clocks. Time zero start go now.
That's right, And I see your clock running more slowly. Meanwhile, you have a telescope. You're looking at my clock. You see mine running more slowly. Right, So we both see the other person as aging more slowly. Right. So now after one hundred years, you see me as only being ten years older, and I see you as only being ten years older, right.
Right, So then I come back and then what happened? Who's older?
M All right, let's break this down really carefully because it is tricky. So when the Earth twin is watching the ship twins clock, he of course sees time moving more slowly on the ship, right, that's relativity. The same way when the ship twin watches the Earth twins clock, he also sees time moving more slowly on Earth. So far everything is symmetric, right, And that's why we like it. Because you could be in ship, you can be in the Earth. It shouldn't really matter. Right now, if they just kept going this way and nothing would change. Of course, they would have conflicting views of whose clock is moving slower, right, But that's okay. In relativity, you can have two people with conflicting but both correct views of the same situation, right, Because there is no ultimate truth, right, Your answers depend on your speed and your location. So what happens to break the symmetry? The symmetry is broken when the space twin turns around. That's an acceleration, right, that changes everything. Wow, only the space twin does any acceleration, so that makes his case different, right, And during that acceleration, the time on Earth seems to zoom forward really fast from the point of view of the space twin. So on the way back, yeah, he sees Earth moving fast and Earth's clock going slowly. But during that acceleration, Earth time has leapt forward really far. So when the space twin gets back to Earth, he's younger than his twin on Earth.
Right.
And the reason they're no longer symmetric is that only the space twin has done any acceleration, so you shouldn't expect them to be the same from each point of view.
It's the coming back that then lets me stay younger.
Yeah, exactly.
Okay, let's dig into it even more. But let's take a quick break.
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All right, so this idea that time moves slower when you're going fast. It's what's cool is that it's always happening, right. It doesn't just happen when you're going at the speed of light or close to the speed of light. It's it happens like on a daily basis.
That's right. It applies all the time. It always applies to things that have velocity relative to you. But it's a really tiny effect if you're not going really really fast. So when you're driving sixty miles an hour on the freeway, yeah, your clock is running a little bit slower, but you'll never notice it.
Wow, But it's there, Like we are all feeling relativity and time dilation all the time everywhere.
There is no way to escape relativity. It is everywhere.
It's relatively everywhere.
It's absolutely This absolute thing about relativity is that it's everywhere.
Okay, so it only happens when you get it's only noticeable, you're saying, when you're going in the closest speed up. But I heard it happens to astronauts here on Earth, like the Space Shuttle, the clocks get out of sync with the clocks on Earth.
That's right, though it takes a lot of precision to measure it. It's something like every six months or so, they lose like less than a hundredth of a second. So it's something we can measure, and they have really precise clocks precisely to measure this, to verify these predictions. But it's not something that people have really like qualitatively experienced. We haven't had an astronaut come back, you know, deep into the future and still feel young. And it gets really nonlinear. Right as you get faster and faster, the effect gets stronger. And stronger.
But they did do the twin experiment with astronauts, right, Like, they sent to one twin into space for a whole year, and then he came back, and technically he was point zero one seconds younger.
That's right. I wonder if he was the one who was originally born first or the one who's originally born second, because it'd be interesting to be like, well, you used to be the older twin, but now I'm the older twin.
I should have stayed up there for ten more years.
Do you think grown up twins still argue by that kind of stuff. Well, I'm the older brother, so you have to listen to me.
Why do you think they're both Auster and us? They're probably trying to one up each other. Oh yeah, I'm an engineer. Oh yeah, I'm a pilot. Oh yeah, I'm a I'm an Auster. Not me too.
Yeah, probably it never ends, right.
But technically that's true. He went out into space, went around the Earth for a whole year. When he came back, technically time for him moved one hundred of a second slower.
Yeah. I wonder what he's gonna do with all that extra time, you know, scratch his nose or something, right.
Yep, it's gone. He lost it.
He used it up. Yeah, But as you go faster and faster, the effect gets stronger and stronger, and as you approach the speed of light, time gets so slow that we can say that if you go the speed of light, time would actually stop.
Oh so I if I'm zooming running past you at the speed of light, you would see my clock totally.
Frozen, exactly. Now, coffeats are important here. Nothing that has mass can actually go the speed of light, right, and only massless things can go the speed of light. So you can never go the speed of light.
Are you saying I have but much mass? Daniel?
You're pretty massive, dude, Yeah, by which I mean you're funny and you're massively awesome, and you have a massively excellent podcast, and you are brilliant. But you're not entirely made of light.
M But that all right, Yeah, I was just fishing for relative compliments.
Absolutely wonderful. So if you have somebody in a spaceship and they're going super duper fast and they're approaching the speed of light, then time slows down further and further to the point where it almost stops. But Remember, for them, time doesn't slow down. It's not like they're living in molasses. It's just our observation of their time. So if somehow a photon had a clock, yeah, our view of the photon's clock would be that it was frozen. Right for us, Photons don't move forward in time. They are frozen in time. But if you were a photon, what would your experience be. Well, it's hard to answer that because you're not a photon, and you have to have a concept of like acensioned photon, which seems impossible. But so it's basically an impossible question to answer. But they remember, your time always moves forward at one second per second.
Okay, so that's the effect of time dilation. Time moves seems to move slower when you're going faster. So let's get into why it happens. Do we know why this happens.
We do know why, and it's the consequence of another really strange, counterintuitive thing that we've observed about the universe that makes very little sense.
So it's a conundrum built on a conundrum.
It's a bizarre, counterintuitive consequence of something really weird about the universe and really weird about light. Actually, it's the fact that everybody always observes light going at the same speed, no matter how fast they're going relative to the source of the light.
Okay, let's break it down what that means. So light travels through space, but nobody can see it move faster than that speed that light moves.
That's right. There's a certain speed of light that goes through space three times ten to the eight meters per second, and we'll call it the speed of light. Of course. And if I'm standing on a planet and I turn on a flashlight, then the light leaves me and travels at three times ten to the eight meters per second away from me.
Right, And if and if you're shooting it at me, then I see moving towards me at three times ten to eight meters per second.
Okay, that's right. Even if you're even if you're on a rocket ship and you're moving towards me, right, saying you're moving towards me at half the speed of light. I shoot my laser beam at you're my flashlight at you. You still see that flashlight, the light from it coming at you at the speed of light, right, And that's different from you know, sound waves or rocks or something.
Or a baseball, Like that's weird, right, Like, if you throw a baseball at me and I'm running full speed towards you, that baseball is going to be it's going to look like it's moving really fast towards me.
That's right. If I throw a baseball at you a one hundred miles an hour, which I promise I can totally do, this is very realistic, and you're running towards me at fifty miles an hour, which I'm sure you're totally capable of, then obviously I see the baseball as moving away from me at one hundred miles per hour, but you see the baseball is coming towards you at one hundred and fifty miles per hour. Right, Yeah, that's the way it works for normal things.
But you're saying that if that baseball instead of a baseball, it was a beam of light, that wouldn't happen.
That's right. Light doesn't follow those rules. Everybody who measures it measures it as traveling at that fixed speed of light, no matter what I mean. There are caveats here, like it slows down when it travels through air or water whatever. But let's just talk about it. In a vacuum. The crazy thing is that it doesn't matter how fast you're going. Everybody sees light as traveling at this maximum speed of the universe, no matter what. And that's crazy, right and right there is where your concept that everybody sees the same thing the same way, or that there is one absolute truth that we're all observing in different ways breaks down, because your description of events and my description of events are going to be very different. If we see light moving at different speeds.
It's like a whe rule of the universe. Not that light. Something can't travel at this faster than the speed of light. It's a weird rule that says nothing can be seen to travel faster than the speed of light, not even light.
That's right. Light always travels at the speed of light, and nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. And these two things are connected, right, because if light operated the same way as baseballs, then you could see light moving as faster than the speed of light just by moving towards me. When I'm shooting a laser at you, right then that light would be moving relative to you at faster than the speed of light. But it doesn't. Right, you move towards me, and you still measure light as moving at the same speed. It doesn't matter if you're running away from me or towards me.
Okay, So if you shoot a light beam at me and I'm running towards you really really really fast, You're going to measure the light moving at the speed of light. And I should measure the light moving faster towards me. But I'm also going to measure moving at the speed of light, even if I'm moving towards you or away from you or to the side of you, exactly, no matter how fast and moving, I'm always going to measure it moving at the speed of light exactly.
And that's crazy, it's bonkers. It doesn't make any sense. And it's a famous experiment, Michael said.
Morall.
The experiment that did this, they shot beams of light in two directions, and because the earth is moving, they figured, well, one of them is going to go slower than the other one because the earth is moving, right, So they did the experiment different times of year, and the light came back took the same amount of time to go in these two perpendicular directions every single time, and that told them that the speed at which light travels is not dependent on how fast you are moving the observer is moving. It's always the same speed. It's crazy.
Is it like some kind of just like fundamental limit in this stuff of the universe itself? You know, like nothing can propagate through this thing we call space faster than the speed of light. Is that kind of what it's related to?
Yeah, definitely. But it's a deep question and we don't have a solid answer to why does light always travel at this speed regardless of the speed of the observer. We don't know the answer to that. That's just like Einstein postulated that. He said, Okay, let's start from this crazy assumption and build the math up from there, and if everything then works, and we'll say, well, that assumption must be true. And if you start from that assumption, you get all sorts of crazy predictions which all turn out to be true. Right, So that is a deep truth of the universe. But the answer is we don't know why. We don't know why light always travels at the same speed, or all light is always observed at the same speed, no matter who is doing the measuring and how fast they're going.
WHOA, it's a weird rule about the universe.
It's a weird, weird rule. And when I meet the people who wrote the simulation, I'm gonna ask them, why did you do that?
Man?
That may everything so complicated in the universe? One star on Yelp for that bit of load. No, I think it's it's there's a fascinating angle there, you know, because we grew up sort of as a species in an environment where nothing goes in near the speed of light, and so we never noticed this, and so we assume things like everybody's clock run at the same time because we've always thought it did, and so that allowed us to assume things like there must be some sort of absolute sense of time and an absolute history, and there's a real universe out there, and this is I mean, this shakes the very foundations of how we even think about the universe that's out there and whether it makes sense at all. So it's pretty crazy stuff.
I feel like we're capped with weirdness at both ends of the spectrum. What I mean is like, if you move it close to the speed of light, things get weird, but also if you don't move it, all things good weird. Right, Because of quantum physics and the uncertainty principle. Right, Like, if you try to discern things that zero velocity, things get weird too.
Things always get weird. I think that's the takeaway, right The universe is weird, Like I think I said last week. It is weirder and stranger and hotter and nastier and wetter than you could ever even imagine. And I think the craziest surprises about the way the universe work are still yet to come. You know, we've made these discoveries that showed us to the universe is so different from the way our ancestors are imagined. There must be more of those discoveries coming. It's certainly not the case that we've figured them all out. There are crazy revelations in our future.
Well, that's good for our podcast topics, that's right. Well, okay, so let's get into how this affects time. But first, let's take a quick break.
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So we know that the speed of light. You can't observer going anything faster than the speed of light. So how does this affect how we view time or how we experience time?
Right? So it comes directly the fact that light can't travel at any other speed is what directly affects how time passes and how we measure time. And it can be a complicated topic, but I think the best way to do is to think about maybe how a simple clock operates. So let's build a simple clock that uses light.
You mean like an Apple watch or.
No, I mean, let's imagine that you have to build a clock and all you have is a laser, right, And so you know, for example, that light takes about ten nanoseconds to go ten feet, right, light goes about one foot every nanosecond. Okay, So what you do is you measure very precisely, you know, ten feet, You put a mirror at the end, and then you shoot your laser. You shoot a laser pulse, and you say, however long it takes to go there and back. That's two seconds, right, ten feet there and ten feet back.
And you set up the mirrors in the floor and in the ceiling, right, so the beam is bouncing up and down right right.
So you you shoot the laser up towards the ceiling and back, and you know how far it is to your ceiling and how far it is back to your floor, and so you say that's twenty feet so that's two seconds round trip.
Oh I see. So then the way you turn that into a clock is you count how many times the light bounces up and down the ceiling, and that sort of gives you a sense of how time is moving.
That's right. You want to say, well, how long does it take my cat to finish his lunch? And so you count how many times it takes the laser pulse to go up to the ceiling and back, and that's the number of two second intervals it takes your cat to eat his lunch.
Okay, so that's it seems like a pretty impractical clock, but.
Hey, this is how we do things in physics. Man. We're like, can we build this thing using lasers.
What's the most inconvenient wristwatch we can build.
It's a lasers at home. The way we toast bread for breakfast is we use laser, of course.
And cats cats. I feel like it's a key.
No, that's just how we toast our cats, man, oh man, that's how you cook the food for their want to. I want to officially distance myself from that joke, because nobody should ever fire a laser at a cat. Well, you can fire a laser near a cat to entertain it, of course, but don't actually hit your cat with a laser, please, oh man. All right, So now we have our clock, right, that's the way a clock that uses light.
Okay, so this is a thought experiment. We're going to build a clock where we measure time by measuring counting how many times it bounces off the ceiling up and down.
That's right, and it doesn't have to be a thought experiment. You got mirrors, you got lasers. Go ahead, build yourself, o' clock. But the interesting thing is, then what happens if you put that clock on a spaceship, right right on a train.
Let's make it even more inconvenient. Let's put the clock on a spaceship, and so that's when things start to get interesting, right, Like, that's when we start to see how time slows down.
Yeah, Or let's put the clock on the back of your cat, right, and then see what happens when you're well, I guess, and you need the ceiling on the back of the cat. Maybe that doesn't actually work.
I feel like trying to get a cat to do what you want is even more difficult than getting on a spaceship.
Einstein had no idea how to get your cat to do what you want. You can master. He was the master of the cosmos, but not of cats.
All right, So we have a clock where you measure time by counting how many times it bounces off the ceiling on the floor, and we stick them in a spaceship, and then we start going what happens then.
Right, So if you're in the spaceship, nothing changes. It doesn't matter that you're going at half the speed of light or nine tenths of speed of light. You're in the spaceship. You have no velocity relative to the clock. So things work the same way in the spaceship for you as it did when you tested your clock in your living room.
I see you just see the beam go up and down, bounce up and down, and you count, and that's your time.
That's right. And since you brought your cat along, it takes your cat the same amount of time to eat his lunch in your spaceship as it does at home, assuming he's not wearing a silly cat spacesuit. The interesting thing is it when since you left me, you left me on Earth, you didn't invite me on your awesome spaceship. Thanks, by the.
Way, that would have been too inconvenient.
And I'm so heartbroken that I'm spying on you have a massive telescope and I'm watching your cat eat lunch on a spaceship. Now I'm looking at your clock, okay, and I'm wondering how long does it takes cat to eat lunch, et cetera. And I'm watching your clock.
Okay, you're trying to count how many times it bounces off the ceiling too.
Hm, exactly. So I see the laser pulse go up, and I see the laser pulse come down. Right. The problem is that I don't see the laser pulse going ten feet up and ten feet down. I see the laser pulse as going further because you're moving, which means the laser pulse is not just going up and down, it's also going sideways in the direction of your motion. So you have the up and down and the sideways. So the light for me, the laser is going in a diagonal right, diagonal up hit the ceiling, and diagonal back down to hit the floor.
Because you see it hit the ceiling and then on its way down, the spaceship is also moving, so it's kind of moving diagonally to hit the floor where it's.
Going to be exactly. And so the mirrors and the clock move with the laser. Obviously they're all going at the same speed sideways, and so the laser beam hits the mirror on the top, and it hits the receiver or whatever on the bottom. But I see it traveling further than you do. Right, And this is where the absolute speed of light kicks in, because you say, okay, it traveled ten feet, right, It traveled those ten feet at the speed of light, So I know it takes ten seconds, but I see it traveled further.
Right.
Depending on how fast you're going, it could have traveled like fourteen fifteen feet right, because light always travels at the same speed. Right, I see it taking longer because it's gone further.
And it can go faster than the speed of light.
It can go faster than the speed of light. So I see your clock running slower. It literally takes longer to count off seconds for you, because the clock is built on the premise that it takes light a certain time to go a certain disc. It's but now that distance is further and the speed can't change.
Because it's going up and down. The light is going up and down, and it's trying to go forward too, exactly, so it has to take longer exactly.
Now, if you built this same kind of clock using something else like sound waves, right, you had a speaker, then this wouldn't happen because the sound waves don't have that same property that they always travel at the speed at a certain speed relative to observers. Right, sound waves, as we know from Doppler shifts, change their speed based on how fast you're going. So if this was a sound wave, if we use sound waves instead, then I would just see the soundwaves as traveling faster. But light can't do that. Light always travels to the same speed no matter who the observer is right, so it slows your clock down.
So let's go back a step. Okay, So I'm going to be in my spaceship counting how many times it bounces off the ceiling. And for me, it's going to be like bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce bounds. But for you, you're saying, because it has to travel up and down and forward, you're going to count it slower, right, Like for you, it's going to be bounce bounds, bounds. And so that's kind of the definition of time.
Yeah, exactly, exactly, and any clock. And you're thinking, okay, well that's just one example, right, But the same argument holds for if you're going in another direction, right, you don't have to be going sideways. If you're shooting in the direction of the mirror, right, then the light has longer to go in one direction, right, but it can't make up the time. And if you go at an angle, the same thing happens. And also for any clock. This is just one example. It's the clearest example because we built it out of something that only uses light, but the same happens for every physical process and for any kind of clock.
Okay, So that's kind of The explanation is that time, the definition of time is sort of tied to the speed of light, and the universe has this weird rule about the speed of light, which is that nobody can ever see it move faster than the speed of light.
That's right. And the other important thing to understand is that your definition of time and your definition of what happens depends on how fast you are going. There is no absolute sense of time. It's not like the universe has a big clock out there and it's keeping track of what's going on, and we're trying to make measures of measurements of it, and they're kind of sloppy sometimes when we get them wrong. Like there is no absolute sense of time. And you can do crazy experiments where you know, depending on how fast people are going relative to the experiment, they can see the order of events changing, like I can see A happen before B, and you can see B happen before A. Because you're assuming in the other direction, and you might think, well, that's impossible either A happened before B or B happened before A. There is a real truth, right, The answer is there is no truth. The truth is not out there. Expiles was a lie.
So I feel like we should get into that in another episode. But I think the conclusion we're reaching here is that basically there is no time.
After all, there's no time to talk about this anymore. And that's true. No, there is time. But time is a different thing that than you thought it was. Right. It's something weirder and moreal now. In our safe, little slow worlds, it doesn't. You can pretend that time is the way you thought it was right and you'll get by just fine. But in reality, if you want to understand the way that physics works at its deepest level, the whether the universe is actually put together, what the real rules are, then it turns out time is really different than you thought it was.
So that person who answered there is no time sort of I feel like she skipped ahead to the end of this country's.
Probably a physicist visiting from the future.
From Alpha Centauri. Is it her?
Or she's your cat evolved the for thousands of years into a future physicist and then traveled back in time to deliver that message.
I think she's your twin Danny.
Maybe she is, maybe she is.
Well, speaking of time, I think we're out of time for this episode.
So it's time to wrap it up. Thank you everyone for your patience and for listening. And if you have questions about how things work in the universe or anything else crazy, please send them to us on Twitter or email us at feedback at Danielandhorge dot com. We love listener questions.
Yeah, hopefully we made time move a little bit faster for you whatever it is you're doing. Unless you were born, which the days have probably canceled out.
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