What Time Dilation ACTUALLY Is In Relativity (Hint: It has nothing to do with time)

foreign it's said that the enigmatic and counter-intuitive nature of time lies at the heart of our modern day theories clocks in different states of motion tick at different rates therefore time is relative but what if there were a completely different way of looking at things one surprisingly more mechanistic and intuitive indeed something remarkable emerges when we decide to treat relativity not as a theory about space time or kinematics but rather as a theory about waves this is dialect with what time dilation actually is imagine that you're going to build yourself a pair of clocks but these won't be any old clocks rather special clocks which tick using sound waves the concept is simple at one end of the clock you'd have a detector waiting to receive a particular sound wave which upon its arrival would cause that detector to register a tick of its clock this detector would then reflect or re-emit that sound wave back towards a second detector at the other end of the clock which would in turn receive it register another tick and once more re-emit the wave back thus with a sound wave continually passing between the two detectors you'd have constructed a viable instrument for measuring the passage of time [Music] now you make the following claim using these clocks you can prove that time is relative to do this you keep one clock ticking at the same location and proceed to fly the other clock around the world ideally this flown clock should be as aerodynamic as possible additionally it should not be enclosed in any structure but rather exposed to the open now when the clocks are reunited you find that less time has elapsed on the traveling clock than on the stationary one what caused this discrepancy well the answer is simple sound waves travel through the medium of air and do so always at the same speed the speed of sound regardless of the speed of the source which emitted them this means a sound clock in motion will function essentially differently from a sound clock which is at rest to see this let's label the speed of sound as C and observe how the ticking of a sound clock at rest compares to one in motion if the distance between the detectors is D then for a clock at rest with respect to the air the time it takes a sound wave to travel that distance will be D over C but if the clock is in motion the distance that the sound wave has to travel between detectors now becomes greater than d meaning it takes a longer amount of time for the wave to travel that distance and thus a longer time for the moving clock to tick this relationship between ticks on the two clocks can be easily Quantified via some simple trigonometry first four o'clock moving at velocity V Let's label the distance which the sound wave has to travel between detectors as D Prime now the at rest clock ticks once every D over C seconds while the moving clock ticks once every D Prime over C seconds the ratio between ticks of the clocks is thus D Prime over d we next note that in the time D Prime over C that it takes the moving clock to tick the clock itself will have traversed a distance V times D Prime over C we can now see that d d Prime and V times D Prime over C all form a right triangle and thus via the Pythagorean relation we can express D in terms of D Prime that is D equals the square root of D Prime squared minus V times D Prime over c squared plugging this expression into our ratio we can factor out the D Prime in the denominator and cancel it with the D Prime in the numerator to leave the expression 1 divided by the square roots of 1 minus V squared over c squared look familiar well it should because it turns out that a sound clock in motion with respect to the air will experience and affect exactly analogous to that which we understand in relativity to be the phenomenon of time dilation that is the sound clock's rate of ticking will be slowed down by a factor determined via the relativistic expression for gamma but with C here standing in for the speed of sound instead of the speed of light an awful coincidence right well the similarities don't end there for instance let's consider what happens to two sound clocks that are separated and then later rejoined in the earlier example when we flew a sound clock around the world the clock which remained stationary with respect to the air wound up showing more elapsed time but now let's say we don't know which clock is stationary with respect to the air and which is in motion [Music] let's consider two cases first the case in which the clock that departs travels away then turns around and returns is the one which is in motion with respect to the air then obviously the stationary clock will tick faster for the entire duration of their separation and so the traveling clock will show less elapsed time upon the reunion but now let's consider the second case wherein both clocks start in motion with respect to the air in this case both clocks Begin by ticking slowly let's label them clock a and clock B next clock B abruptly slows down so it is stationary with respect to the air while clock a continues traveling off once stationary clock B will actually tick faster than its counterpart however if clock B wants to catch back up to clock a it must do so by traveling through the air at a velocity greater than that with which clock a is already traveling so let's say clock B spent five seconds being stationary with respect to the air during which clock a traveled away at a velocity of three-fifths the speed of sound so that over this duration it recorded only four elapsed seconds foreign next clock B troubles at a velocity of four-fifths the speed of sound in order to catch back up to clock a traveling at this velocity it will take clock B 20 seconds to catch back up to clock a over this duration 16 more seconds will have elapsed on clock a resulting in the clock showing 20 total elapsed seconds but for this same duration only 12 seconds will have elapsed on clock B resulting in the clock showing only 17 total elapsed seconds thus when they are reunited the clock which turned around to catch back up will still show less elapsed time even though it was at rest with respect to the air during some portions of the trip now we can repeat this experiment assuming any arbitrary initial velocities of our sound clocks with respect to the air and the end result will always be the same whichever clock turns around to rejoin its companion will always end up showing less elapsed time this is in consequence of it achieving a greater total average velocity with respect to the air over the duration of its trip likewise in special relativity we find that for any two clocks that are separated and rejoined whichever clock turned around or accelerated to rejoin its companion will always end up recording less elapsed time unfortunately in special relativity due to the insistence on preserving the symmetry of observers differing states of motion there has never been a clear consensus on what causes time dilation you can see that even the experts are clearly confused by it such as when they inaccurately claim that only acceleration causes time dilation or conflate time dilation with the Doppler effect or even bequeath unto time violation the power of causal agency itself then of course there are the multitude of differing interpretations as to what resolves the twin paradox but in our soundclock universe something like the twin paradox becomes exceedingly simple all we need to do is Imagine constructing something like say humanoid robots which operate based off of sound signals foreign functioning in these robots will be affected by their motion through the air such that they will experience time differently depending on that state of motion for instance say we construct two robots that are designed to sprout white hairs when they turn say 10 seconds old based on their respective sound clocks then if we separate and rejoin these robots we'll find that whichever robot turns around or accelerates in order to rejoin its twin will take longer to sprout its white hairs and thus in accordance with the results of the twin paradox wind up being the younger twin so what does this all mean well essentially any observable demonstration of time dilation that we can make in special relativity can be mapped to a demonstration of time dilation in our sound clock universe this strongly suggests we could invert such a mapping and interpret relativity not as some mystical theory about the altering of space and time but rather as a theory about how just as sound always travels at the same speed through the air light always travels at the same speed through some sort of medium this is a model known as dynamical relativity rooted in lorenz's ether Theory it was revived in modern form around the 1980s after drawing inspiration from the wave mechanics of quantum physics but in academic journals it's often presented as merely a heuristic tool an aid for intuition for incoming students as opposed to an actual interpretation in its own right of course due to the staunchly entrenched dogmas of modern physics it's hard to imagine that such papers would ever get published were they to present the idea in any other way but for the critical thinker the fact that we can recreate the formalism of Relativity in a toy universe wherein information travels via sound waves instead of light waves should set off some pretty serious alarm Bells well okay but you might object that we haven't recreated the entire formalism of Relativity just parts of it indeed let's recap what we have done so far first we've shown that time dilation can be interpreted as a mechanistic effect of setting clocks in motion relative to a medium then we've shown that if you don't know what your motion is relative to that Medium no coincident comparisons of clocks I.E comparisons where clocks have been separated and then rejoined will ever reveal it to you lastly we've shown that if information itself is assumed to be transmitted through this medium then this dilation effect isn't just limited to clocks but rather extends to anything that relies on that information for its functioning if you're familiar with relativity you've likely already seen time dilation derived in a mechanistic like Pythagorean manner for light clocks before so the first point shouldn't be too surprising similarly you're probably already aware that the speed of light is also conjectured to be the speed of information so the third Point shouldn't reorient your understanding much either but the second Point gives us something crucial and new because it offers us a sort of uncertainty principle for clocks that is since no clock-based measurement could ever be used to determine our motion with respect to the ether this means there's no way to tell if our clock is ticking in accordance with true universal time or if it is ticking at a dilated rate meaning it is not time itself which is relative merely our knowledge of it now this precipitates an epistemological conundrum of sorts because any uncertainty in time-based measurements will propagate as uncertainty in other types of measurement for instance given a known distance we'll find that any Judgment of velocity will be subject to the uncertainty of our time judgment since moving observers would unknowingly judge their velocities to be greater conversely given a known velocity it then becomes judgments of distance which suffer this uncertainty since moving observers traversing such distances would unknowingly judge them to be shorter which brings us round to our essential conclusion when we derived gamma for our sound clocks the V and C stood for velocities with respect to our medium of air and subsequently all our use of these quantities represented measurements that were certain but in Einstein's gamma the V and C stand for velocities with respect to the Observer not the medium so if any manner of uncertainty can be shown to have crept into these values it will reflect across every other type of measurement the theory has to offer indeed it is this clue which will point us towards unraveling the remaining mysteries of relativity Mysteries such as length contraction or the relativity of simultaneity placing us just steps away from being able to give physical intuition to the entirety of the theory meaning very soon for the first time we will be in possession of an interpretation that doesn't rely on mathematical abstraction now a huge shout out here to our patreon subscribers through whose support we've been able to bring these recent Revelations to light and to all our viewers who have countenanced our search for real answers over the years we hope your excitement for what lies ahead is as great as ours this has been dialect stay tuned foreign

Channel: Dialect

Views: 198,321

Keywords: relativity, special relativity, einstein, time, time dilation, gamma factor, Lorentz transformations, time and space, spacetime, physics, learn, education

Id: eKkH4IH-zmw

Length: 16min 46sec (1006 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 05 2023