In 1969, Apollo 11’s voyage to the moon ended the space race and captured the imagination of billions but it is what we confirmed when they returned that truly astonished.
A perfectly accurate clock was sent into space with the crew, while another, equally accurate clock remained on Earth. After the eight day voyage, the clocks were found to be 2.779 billionths of a second off. While this would seem irrelevant to most, and certainly never made any headlines in a time when man had just finished landing on another world, but the fact confirmed Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity, which stated that as one moved faster, time in their area slowed down. Scientists predicted that the Apollo 11 launch would distort time by 2.78 billionths of a second, which was almost exactly borne out by experiment.
When two cars side by side are traveling at 40 miles per hour, neither moves ahead of the other, despite the fact that both are moving. If one of these two cars were to move at 80 MPH, we would expect them to be 40 miles apart after an hour. While logical, this idea proved invalid for light. Albert Einstein realized that no matter how fast one went, light always moved ahead at the same speed, as if one was not moving at all — it would be as if the car moving 80 MPH were always 80 miles ahead of you after an hour, whether you were standing still or moving 79 MPH. Despite skepticism, numerous points of evidence convinced scientists worldwide that Einstein was right. The only possibility, then, was that time itself were changing “speed.”
The car moving 40 MPH sees the faster car pulling ahead of it, and at the end of an hour notices that the car has travelled 40 miles ahead of it. A man sitting still when the cars started moving also watched the cars for an hour, but observes that the faster car is also 40 miles ahead of him after an hour. The only solution, then, is that the hours must be different. The fast car was faster than both, but it would take twice as long for the car to be 40 miles away from the slow car than from the sitting man, thus, one hour inside the slow car is equal to two hours for the still man. This rule is true even at slow speeds, but they are far too slow compared the “fast car” — which is light, traveling at 185,000 miles per second — to matter. Even the Apollo rockets were only able to slow time by billionths of a second.
While it is theoretically impossible to travel faster than the speed of light, the fact that time can be changed may make it possible to “work around,” this limitation. That, and other potential ways of exceeding the speed of light barrier, will be the focal point of my next article.
Alexander Link is a junior at Tahoma High school and a self described math nerd. He is taking two AP math courses this year and this will be his third year participating in Bear Metal, Tahoma’s robotics club.
