Thus, the calculations show that at 25% of the speed of light, the effect is just 1.03 (a mere 3% slowing of time or contraction of length) at 50% of the speed of light, it is just 1.15 at 99% of the speed of light, time is slowed by a factor of about 7 and at 99.999, the factor is 224. The Lorentz factor, γ (gamma) is given by the equation γ ≡, so that the effect increases exponentially as the object's velocity v approaches the speed of light c. The amount of length contraction and time dilation is given by the Lorentz factor, named after the Dutch physicist Hendrik Lorentz, who had been exploring such transformation equations since as early as 1895, long before Einstein began his work (indeed some would claim that Lorentz and Henri Poincaré between them anticipated almost everything in Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity). The closer the speed of an objects approaches to the speed of light, the more warped lengths and time intervals become. To some extent, the faster you go, the slower you age and the slimmer you are! The reason this is not obvious in everyday situations is that the differences at everyday speeds are infinitesimally small, and only really become apparent at speeds approaching that of light itself (“relativistic” speeds). Thus, one person’s interval of space is not the same as another person’s, and time runs at different rates for different observers traveling at different speeds. In fact, it also tells us (as we will see in subsequent sections) that the mass of a moving object measures more as its velocity increases until, at the speed of light, it becomes infinite.
It also tells us that moving clocks run more slowly as their velocity increases until, at the speed of light, they stop running altogether. In a nutshell, the Special Theory of Relativity tells us that a moving object measures shorter in its direction of motion as its velocity increases until, at the speed of light, it disappears.
This revolutionary idea flew in the face of the long-held notion of simultaneity (the idea that events that appear to happen at the same time for one person should appear to happen at the same time for everyone in the universe) and suggested that it was impossible to say in an absolute sense whether two events occurred at the same time if those events were separated in space.Īt relativistic speeds, space “contracts” and time “dilates” Thus, the dimensions of space and time affect each other, and both space and time are therefore relative concepts, with only the unvarying speed of light providing the bedrock on which the universe is built. Some of the motion through space can be thought of as being "diverted" into motion through time (and vice versa), in much the same way as a car traveling north-west diverts some of its northwards motion towards the west. In fact, Einstein realized, the answer is both: space “ contracts” and time “ dilates” (or slows). He began to realize that either the measurement of the distance must be smaller than expected, or the time taken must be greater than expected, or both. In the Special Theory of Relativity, published in his so-called “miraculous year” of 1905, Einstein had the audacity to turn the question around and ask: what must happen to our common notions of space and time so that when the distance light travels in a given time is measured, the answer is always 300,000 km/s? For example, if a spaceship fires a laser beam at a piece of space debris flying towards it at half the speed of light, the laser beam still travels at exactly the speed of light, not at one-and-a-half times the speed of light.
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