In Test of Relativity Theory, Superaccurate Atomic Clocks Prove Your Head Ages Nanoseconds Faster than Your Feet

I'm confused. Isn't the experiment showing exactly the opposite from what the author is claiming? Isn't the higher clock falling behind, meaning that time is moving more slowly, meaning that people in Boulder are aging less rapidly than those of us at sea level?

Something sounds off, your head, since it is higher and less effected by gravity should age less than your feet, just like the clock on top experienced less time so will your head.

Yeah think so.. shouldn't you be going faster at higher altitudes because angular speed remains constant. So if you move faster, time is slower.

So .... Doesn't this effectively *prove* time travel? If we could take this "miniscule" distance and stretch it to unimaginable lengths ... wouldn't you be stretching/traveling through time depending on your location in relation to the starting point? I'm confused ;(

I think we need a better explanation, some diagrams, and a space monkey.

Yes chad, its a well study thing by now.

If you travel near the speed of light for ten years, 1000 years would pass on earth.

I'm confused too... but maybe this may help... or confuse us more:

The faster the relative velocity is, the greater the magnitude of time dilation - meaning it will stretch time out the faster (and closer) you are to a gravitational field. The problem is that we have to have two points of observation in order to compare. I think it has to do with being in two perspectives, that a change (or discrepancy) in "simultaneity" will occur. For example, if I'm facing North and look left, I'm looking West but if someone else was facing south and looking left, they're looking East. Bad example probably, but does this make any sense?

It's already abstract for us to think about the same event not occuring at the same time no matter where we are - we're used to thinking that there's this simultaneous event that occurs in the same time for everyone.

There's also the theory that if you go beyond light-speed, time will slow down greatly, and time travel is possible. I'm not saying I believe or disbelieve it, but I'll be interested in studies that go further with this. :-)

Relativistic time dilation occurs from both speed differentials and gravitational differentials. The two effects can be summed up (a rocket in orbit is farther from the center of earth's gravity AND moving faster relative to that snail on your lawn). The smallest "commonly referenced" unit of time is the attosecond, 10 to the minus 18th second. The smallest experimentally measured unit is a femtosecond (10 the minus 15th second). This done by splitting laser beams and racing the split beams around a light table to detectors. So hurry up, already. Time travel may be possible, but when you get there where will you be standing if the whole galactic spiral and solar system keep moving, huh? I have often wondered if there are consequences from the constant fluctuations in the velocity of the earth moving through space. Anybody know of a theory or experiment that covers that?

I was confused at first as well. I figured it out. Lets say that for every second that passes in Colorado 3 seconds pass in New York. Both New Yorkers and Coloradoans age at the same rate but New Yorkers measurement of time would be three seconds where as Coloradoans measurement of time would have only been one second so theoretically the Coloradoans aged quicker even though the same amount of time had passed. This still sounds confusing but it does make sense in my head anyway.

Oshgosh i think you still have it backwards, and banana it is interesting to think about going faster than the speed of light, but if you do you would affect causality in nature and also have to throw out Einstein's theories.

You are "moving faster" at lower altitudes, because you are closer to the gravitational center of mass, of the Earth ... Gravity = acceleration ... greater near the source.

I understand that star travellers will age less, because of high relativistic speeds ... But, as far as the distance from the source of gravity ... Does not time dilate MORE as you fall into a black hole, for instance? Yet this article implies that one would age slower, outside the event horizon ... or, does it?
And then there is Gravity Probe "B" ... Frame dragging, and all that. So my feet are older than my head? Fine, I can live with that.

No Buzz.. your feet are YOUNGER than your head (read the articles title). Yes it is confusing, but the main point is kind of simple: The closer you are to the center of a gravitational field and/or the faster your going, the slower time will move. I remember the book "A Brief History of Time" having a really good explanation.. i might read it again

"A Brief History of Time" was a terrific read. "Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy" by Kip Thorne I'd say had a much better intro and first few chapters explaining most of this content for anybody looking for further info. The latter book also dives into a bunch of theory concerning time travel, time dilation, etc. on top of the more "basic" tools of relativistic physics.

What i don'T get about the gravitional field and speed relation here is that the two clocks are fixed to why would acceleration have to do with anything. They dont move to they dont gain speed. Maybe you could just say that because they are closer to the gravitational center you age slower but i find it odd that the shorter you are to the gravitational center 'makes' you be going faster... If you're standing on your feet, you're still.. you dont have any speed, and the only speed i can see is that of the rotation of the earth which then points you to the fact that you would actually go faster a your head since angular speed of the earth is the same (whatever distance from the center) but 2 meters-ish higher, the velocity is greater.

based on these comments, it looks like we've proved it, but can't properly explain how we proved it.

is time really different in different gravitational forces and at different speeds? Or rather is our measurement of it effected? How would you know as your time ruler is effected by changes in speed and gravitational forces. This means time itself doesn't necessarily change. Einstein himself was unsure of this and settled on the relativity being constant. The calculations are too complicated and the outcome is the same anyway. If the law of relativity stays constant, then all else can be changed. We now know the speed of light is decaying. However it's effect remains the same (in most cases) as what is constant is the law of relativity. So is the universe really expanding? OR does it just look like it is because the speed of light is slowing down? My theory is that the universe is really shrinking, decaying, fulfilling the second law of thermodynamics the law of entropy or decay. It looks like it's expanding because we see it as it was and view it as we are. Factor in different light speeds and everything changes, even the size of the atom and it follows, the size of the universe. hmmmmm you can measure this rate of decay because the light we see in the heavens is old and shows a universe in a lower state of decay. Your rate of perceived expansion will be close to the actual rate of universal entropy. Calculate this and you may come close to predicting an atomic collapse date. (even the universe has a half life) I'd like to try and prove all this but don't have the means. I think it would put science as we know it on it's head.

It seems to me that the scientists who are testing relativity are forgetting relativity.

We all agree that relativity indicates that an object that moves faster experiences time at a slower rate. The confusing part comes from the data we bring in. Here we have a test that says that your head ages faster since it has a longer path around the earth in its orbit which seems contrary to the evidence gathered from flying a clock around the world and discovering that it was behind a clock that was standing still. How could similar tests yield opposite results?!?!

Simple.

The Earth is rotating at roughly 1000mph around its center. At the same time it is orbiting the sun at 67,000mph. During all of this, the Earth, the Sun, and the rest of the solar system is hurtling around the galactic center at over 600,000mph.
For the sake of simplicity let us assume that all these vectors are in the same plane. That means that on one side of the earth we are moving at 600,000+67,000+1000=668,000mph.
But what about the other side? It would be moving backwards relative to the velocity of the galaxy and so going 600,000+67,000-1000=666,000mph. This means that half the time you are adding the velocity and half the time you are subtracting it. This also applies to which direction we are going when orbiting the Sun.
So, while you head is always going faster than your feet relative to the Earth, on average it is going the same speed relative to space/time. The results of all these relativity tests depend on what time they are taken.

I should amend that my above statement only applies to kinematic time dilation and not to gravitational time dilation.

I must be a strange person, because I've always thought about this long before reading any articles, I remember when i was younger hearing about how time slows down closer you approach the speed of light, and that apparently if you could travel faster then speed of light and go back to your point of original you could essentially travel back in time, however always doubted this to be possible.

However i did think to myself, if time really does move slower the faster your traveling and not just from perspective from point of orgin, then maybe those who fly in airplanes a lot, or things that float in orbit must experience time at a faster rate then those on ground....

So this experiment does verify that time does indeed move faster higher you are due to moving faster? this article doesn't seem to indicate this is why time moves faster higher up (or slower?).

Also i'm curious if they re-arrange clocks so that top is now on bottom and run same test again without resetting their times if they would go back to matching exact time exactly.

To be honest, even though i find all this interesting, i still seriously doubt time actually moves faster faster you travel, i think it's just a matter of perspective, viewing something moving away from you will seem to slow down, because light takes longer and longer to reach you, while if they turned around and started heading back, then they would seem to speed up faster then they where actually moving because now light is taking shorter and shorter time to reach you, so that when they got back they didn't experience any different lengths of time then you did at the place of origin and that people seem to completely disregard light affects how we perceive things.

Eh. Time is not being measured in these experiments, just the oscillation of a particle. That's the mechanism we often use to measure time, of course, but it's not actually measuring time any more than a wind-up spring-powered clock is measuring actual time. So a change in the behavior of a clock should not be interpreted to mean that time is changing. Of course that particle is going to behave differently if different fields (or strengths of field) are applied to it. By this logic, I could take a magnet and apply it to one clock: "Voila! I now am the Master of Time!" The more sensitive the instrument, the more you are going to be able to distinguish variations in field effects, such as Earth's gravitational field on a given particle (or on the magnetic fields containing that particle). That's exciting - we can measure tiny fluctuations in the gravitational field! - but it's not Time.

Here's something to make your heads hurt. The earth spins on its axis *avg* 800mph, Its orbit around the sun, about 67,062mph, our galaxy spins in space (who knows) its said to be 300 km/sec or 671,080.888 mph.(depending on where you are) So what would happen to this experiment if the clocks were TRULY standing still? We are all constantly moving at very high rates of speed in relation to the emptiness of the universe.

"In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before.".. Paul Dirac

Explains why gray hairs appear on your head first.

The theory of relativity states that the delta of any measurement is perceived differently depending on its relative position. Time is nothing more than the word we use to measure change like distance or temperature are measurements of static differences. Whether something is closer or further away, hotter or colder, louder or quieter, the difference will always be a positive number. You can can make things happen faster or slower, but you cannot make change un-happen. The only thing they have proven is that the theory of relativity accurately shows that even at infinitesimally small differences in relative position, we still perceive infinitesimally small differences in change.

Now that science is finally dealing with relativity on the human scale, how much longer is it going to be before they rethink their measurements in distant space?