Does light travel further when time dilation slows the clock?

Join the discussion
Registration is free. Ask a follow-up in this thread, or start your own.
2 replies · 2K views
Jose Estrada
Messages
1
Reaction score
0
10 seconds somewhere can be one on Earth due to time dilation, right? So In the case of distance wouldn't light have traveled more than 186,282 MPS since it had 10 seconds to travel relative to the 1 second on earth. So if light traveled at 186,282MPS for 10 seconds it would have traveled 1,862,820 Miles in 1 seconds for someone on earth?Is this correct or am I forgetting some sort of Law? Sorry if this is a very dumb question. I'm curious.
 
Physics news on Phys.org
Jose Estrada said:
10 seconds somewhere can be one on Earth due to time dilation, right? So In the case of distance wouldn't light have traveled more than 186,282 MPS since it had 10 seconds to travel relative to the 1 second on earth. So if light traveled at 186,282MPS for 10 seconds it would have traveled 1,862,820 Miles in 1 seconds for someone on earth?Is this correct or am I forgetting some sort of Law? Sorry if this is a very dumb question. I'm curious.
There's length contraction and relativity of simultaneity going on as well as just time dilation. When you allow for the effects of all three, everything comes out consistently.

To really see how this works, you'll have to learn to use the Lorentz transformations (from which the time dilation and length contraction formulas are derived).
 
  • Like
Likes   Reactions: Jose Estrada
Jose Estrada said:
10 seconds somewhere can be one on Earth due to time dilation, right? So In the case of distance wouldn't light have traveled more than 186,282 MPS since it had 10 seconds to travel relative to the 1 second on earth. So if light traveled at 186,282MPS for 10 seconds it would have traveled 1,862,820 Miles in 1 seconds for someone on earth?Is this correct or am I forgetting some sort of Law? Sorry if this is a very dumb question. I'm curious.
One thought experiment that leads to the conclusion of time dilation between reference frames starts with the simple premise that the observed speed of a light ray is the same in both frames.

So, you've got things a little back to front.