Suppaman said:
I just finished my nap, you do those at my age. Now, saying it changes because it does, well, not useful if you want to create a test of the "how." Yes, I know, a lot of things are not yet known, but there must be some speculation. It would seem the fabric, vacuum of space, how this could interact on the very small scale of the things that make "matter" might explain something. And I am interested in thinking about such speculation but I know I lack the science to even do that, but some people must have.
Try thinking of it this way:
You and someone else are standing next to each other on a flat featureless plane. You start walking North at a fixed pace, and your companion starts walking Northeast at the same pace.
It is obvious that your companion is not traveling North at the same rate as you are. He is dividing up his motion between Northward and Eastward movement.
Now swap "moving North" with "moving through time" and "moving East" with "moving in space"
Now with this view, you are moving forward through time at a fixed rate, but not moving in space. You are "at rest". Your companion is also moving through time, but also is moving through space. But he still has to "divide up" his over all "motion" between these two. Thus he doesn't move through time as fast as you do.
This is basically the idea behind time dilation due to motion. Space and time have been combined into a single idea of Space-time that are no longer independent of each other.
However, there is an additional rub. With the above example, both parties involved agree as to who is progressing "North" or through "time" at the greater rate.
But there is no equivalent to North-South or East-West in space-time. Only the equivalents of forward-back and Left-Right.
So in our examples above, each of you judges that the direction you are walking in as being "forward", and that the other person is making slower progress in the "forward" direction than you are.
If forward movement is the space-time equivalent of moving through time, and left-right as space, then each of you judge yourself as moving through time, but not space and the other as moving through both time and space. Each considers himself as being at "rest". It also means that each of you judges the other as moving more slowly through time ( aging slower).
The gist of it is that the relationship between time and space is more complicated than it is assumed to be in Newtonian physics, and everyone measures their movement through it according to their own reference, as there is no fixed "direction" to time or space.