On Sun, 28 Sep 2003 12:27:24 GMT, "G.P" wrote:


"Whisper" wrote in message
...

Can someone explain in layman's terms how time travel is possible the
closer
we get to speed of light?

How: Time dilation afforded by Einstein Special Relativity. The faster you
travel the slower your internal clocks runs with respect to someone
stationary or traveling slower. If someone 40 years old with a newly born
child were to leave earth (alone, leaving the child behind) traveling at 98%
of the speed of light and come back 10 years of his clock after he left, he
would be 50 years old, his newly born child would also be 50 years old!!

Google it for more information.

Guillermo


That makes some sense, but in reality if one were to travel to the
nearest star at light speed it would take only 4.something years to
get there, Your watch may be wrong, but elapsed time will have been
those 4. years. If once you got there you discovered that there were
no planets and no reason to be there and promptly went home, you would
find that just about 9 years have elapsed since you left So in
reality no time dilation has really occurred. It just seems from your
perspective that it didn't take that long to make the trip. Why it
would be like that has never been explained to me in a way that I
would understand it though. I have seen the illustrations and get
that, but why would it be like that? There seems to be no logical
reason for it. I guess it could be counted as a perk of space travel.
Once you get to C the immense distances seem smaller and long trips
become much less time consuming to the astronauts.
But why does that happen? What is the mechanism that causes the effect
of time "squeezing" for those going at or near C?