It's a very strange concept, at odds with what we perceive with our own eyes. It all comes down to referential frames. Think of them like rooms. The speed time passes in a room depends on how fast the room is travelling. If time is passing twice as slowly for you, you'll only get through ten years in the "time" other people get through twenty. When you come out of the room, after ten years, it'll be the year 2034, not 2024, so effectively you've gone ten years into the future (although it's also taken you ten years to do it).
The part that I always get hung up on is trying to measure your "passage of time" against that of an object that is speeding away from you close to the speed of light.
After all, the passage of time only really matters if we have a strict definition of what is past, present, and future. And relativity tells us that this can change depending on which reference frame you are in.
What purpose does it serve us to compare "our time" against "their time" when they are so far away that we can't even communicate in "real time"?
Is it normal to think Time Travel will Never be Invented
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I've tried to learn about time dilation many times, but I can never understand how it is anything more than an optical illusion.
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Hamartia
9 years ago
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It's a very strange concept, at odds with what we perceive with our own eyes. It all comes down to referential frames. Think of them like rooms. The speed time passes in a room depends on how fast the room is travelling. If time is passing twice as slowly for you, you'll only get through ten years in the "time" other people get through twenty. When you come out of the room, after ten years, it'll be the year 2034, not 2024, so effectively you've gone ten years into the future (although it's also taken you ten years to do it).
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Sog
9 years ago
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The part that I always get hung up on is trying to measure your "passage of time" against that of an object that is speeding away from you close to the speed of light.
After all, the passage of time only really matters if we have a strict definition of what is past, present, and future. And relativity tells us that this can change depending on which reference frame you are in.
What purpose does it serve us to compare "our time" against "their time" when they are so far away that we can't even communicate in "real time"?