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by timay002 on February 13th, 2005

timay002

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What makes time keep going forward?

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  • by JackNicklaus on May 24th, 2006

    JackNicklaus

    Einstein shook up the whole concept of time with his relativity theories. It seems time is not a constant. It's relative to the speed of light. Time can speed up or slow down depending upon your point of observation. As you move and speed up relative to some other fixed point, time can speed up or slow down. It gets a little tricky to comprehend. To try and understand consider this situation. A space ship has a movie screen attached to it's hull. A film projector is aimed at the screen with the space ship sitting at rest on the Earth's surface. You see the images projected upon the screen in a sequencial pattern that makes you see the movie as you would view it normally. Now imagine the space ship flying away from the Earth. The number of frames hitting the screen each second would slow down because the space ship is moving away from the projector and the frames of the movie are traveling at the speed of light towards the screen. Because fewer frames of the movie are hitting the screen each second the movie will apear to slow down. As the space ship speeds up the movie will apear to get slower and slower. When the space ship hits the speed of light, the one frame hitting the screen will make the movie apear like a snapshot...time will stand still. Now imagine the space ship going faster than the speed of light. The movie will apear to run in reverse. Are you still with me? This gets a little complicated.
    The point to this story is time is dependent on the position of the observer. Time is not a constant. Time is relative to the speed of the observer and what he is observing. Think about the stars you see at night in the sky. The light that hits your eye ball could have traveled for many years before it reached you. The star could have collapsed years ago and doesn't exist anymore, but you are still collecting the light that left it's surface a long time ago.

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