velocity time dialation help?

[Killswitch49]

i am asking this here because i am guessing you guys are smarter than the average yahoo awnsers person. anyway i have been reading about it for a school project and i am confused as fuck. All they say is moving clocks go slower. Can anyone explain it better.

[spartaman64]

if you imagine a photon bouncing between two mirrors it will have a straight up and down path. but if it starts moving it will go in a zig zag path and be slightly slower

[spartaman64]

also there is a dimension of time and space like there is north and east. if you are moving north all your motion is in the north direction but if you move north east part of your motion will be north and part will be east so you wont go north as quickly same with time and space

[What's a GPU?]

It's all part of special relativity, the math behind it is crazy complicated, but there is a simple formula that sums up the effects of it but doesn't necessarily explain it. T = t / (1 - v^2/c^2)^1/2. Just in general remember that the faster an object moves, the slower time will be in respect to the initial reference of the observer.

[What's a GPU?]

I forgot to mention what the values are in the formula, my bad. T is the observed time, t is the time in the initial reference frame, v is the velocity of the object, and c is the speed of light in a vacuum which can be rounded off to 3.00 * 10^8 m/s.

[Keudn]

Think of time and velocity as two parts of the same thing, movement through space-time. ALL objects have the same speed through space time, C, which happens to be the speed of light in a vacuum since light has no mass.  Anyway the difference between me and a car on the highway is that I am sitting stationary so ALL of my movement at the speed of C is through time and none is through space. The car on the other hand has some of its speed of C moving though space, and since all objects travel at C then it must be moving slightly slower through time as some of that speed is in space. This means that the car experiences time at a slightly slower rate than I am since it is moving. Keep in mind when I say I am stationary I am only stationary RELATIVE to the car, in fact movement as a whole is all dependent on point of view. Relative to the sun I am moving 30km/sec. Movement through time is the same way since space and time aren't separate things.

 

Another way to visualize this is on a graph. Imagine the y-axis being space and x being time. If I am stationary all my movement is through the x axis so my graph is flat. If I am moving then some of that constant speed is through the y-axis now, so my graph starts to move upward. Of course once my graph moves upward then distance traveled on the x-axis is less, so I am moving through time slower.

 

Check out this reddit post for a more detailed description http://np.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/22pi7o/z/cgp58ml