Sunday, 17 November 2013

special relativity - time on earth compared to completely stationary in space

Time dilation is a relative phenomenon, not a local phenomenon.



As adrianmcmenamin mentioned, Earth's motion around the sun is cause for no more time dilation than any other point in the universe. Consider that the sun is travelling around the galaxy at 200 km/s, and the Milky Way is approaching Andromeda at 130 km/s. We do not know at what speed we are approaching the great attractor, and I hope that at this point it becomes obvious that there is no difference in "us approaching the great attractor" to "the great attractor approaching us". Nothing is considered "stationary to the background" in an infinite, expanding universe as there is no "background" to measure against.



Consider the gedankenexperiment of comparing a clock on Earth to a clock orbiting the galaxy. Now compare those clocks to clocks outside the galaxy. You might consider the clock that ticks the most time away to be the "most at rest clock". Now I ask you, how will you compare the clocks? You must move at a significant portion of the speed of light for a very long time to get information from one clock to the next. Thus, the messenger would suffer the effects of Special Relativity, rendering the comparison meaningless.



To further the point, consider the development of International Atomic Time. I'll quote directly from wikipedia:




In the 1970s, it became clear that the clocks participating in TAI were ticking at different rates due to gravitational time dilation




Consider, those were clocks on Earth suffering from measurable time dilation due only to their latitude and altitude differences and the effect of moving information across the distances between them!

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