How Does Our Movement Through Spacetime Influence the Perception of Time?

[pervect]

"rate of second elapse"
As I understand it - a second elapses at a slower rate as we approach the speed of light. Its measured with atomic clocks.
Is this not true?

I see we've had a lot of responses in the meantime...

This remark is close to being true, but you actually need two clocks to determine what you are calling the "rate of second elapse".

It may be a bit obvious, but when you compare a clock to itself, it always ticks at 1 second per second.

To come up with a number different than 1, you must compare your clock to someone else's clock.

But the first question you have to ask is "which clocks are being compared?" And the next question involves "how do we compare them".

For cases involving gravitational time dilation, there are easy answers to both of these questions. We compare our clock in a gravity well to a distant clock outside the gravity well, and the round-trip time is a constant, so there is no real issue on how to compare the rate of the clocks.

Things are not nearly so easy for two clocks, sitting in space, both moving.

One of the basic principles of relativity is that it is impossible to tell who is moving, and who is standing still.

One highly non-intuitive consequence of this is that from the point of view of twin A and twin B, who are moving relative to each other, is that A thinks B's clocks are runnign slow, and B thinks A's clocks are runnign slow. And they are both, in some sense, correct.

This is known as the "twin paradox". There has been a lot written about its resolution, the key point turns out to be that there isn't actually a standard way to compare the rate of separated clocks that are moving relative to each other. "Which clock is slow" depends on the mechanism of the comparison operation.

For instance, suppose you compare clocks by bringing them physically back to the same point in space. Then one of the clocks, A or B, must accelerate.

If A and only A accelerates, it will have the least elapsed time. If B and only B acclerates, it will havea hte least elapsed time.

 

[Vagelford]

Im thinking that you can determine speed by using the initial big bang point of singularity as a point of reference - something which nobody has considered so far as I am aware.
To me - c - that's just a nice effect in an expanding sphere of matter.
I would rather see that as we travel back towards the point of origin, that our "rate of second elsapse" would accelerate as we subtract x from our speed of outbound motion from the blast - where x would be our speed measure towards the point of the blast.

You are on the initial big bang point. That is the meaning of the big bang theory. All the points in space were at the moment of the big bang the central point. There is no special point in the universe. I find very good the analogy of the expanding balloon were the space is the surface of the balloon and the original point is in the centre of the balloon, i.e. a point in space-time outside the current spatial hyper surface and not on it and the place that all the points of the balloon occupied at the initial moment.