justchristian said:
I'm perfectly aware of several such experiments and I stand behind my statement that Relativity and all such experiements while very interesting DO NOT PROVE THAT TIME EXISTS!
These experiments don't even prove time dialation accually occures. The use very sofisticated clocks and use really fancy terminology all of which obscures the flaw in all such experiments which is that you cannot tell if it is time that is being dialated or if it something about the clocks themselves that is being changed. It makes no difference what sort of clock you use, you are still ticking off regular set of events. I understand that the time dialation fits with the math and that at least in that regard the math is sucstanciated but there is nothing here that explains the WHY. The point being that we simply don't know if the so called time dialation is real or if it is only aparrent.
At the end of the day we have two clocks both sitting in the same room
at the same time, the only difference is one has ticked ten times while the other has ticked nine. It's not as if one clock is still lagging behind in some other time continuum which is what one would expect if someone left this time frame and went into the future which is exactly what these experiments are suggesting happened to the stationary clock relative to the moving one. If that happened, then how did the moving clock ever catch back up again? And make no mistake about it, it has to have caught back up or else it wouldn't be here, but the fact of the matter is it never left. Did it just skip over a few nanoseconds of time and thereby not ever experience those moments at all, or what? If so, how did that happen? Did the moving clock move into our past or did we move into it's future? If it's time was dialated, one or the other has to have happend but according to Einstein you cannot tell which because you cannot tell which clock is really doing the moving. And the fact is it doesn't matter which is really moving because it's all relative. They say the moving clock ran slower but cannot tell whether their moving clock was really ever moving in the first place. Maybe it was sent off in just the right direction to cancel out a previous vector which we and the stationary clock we already on in which case it is we and the so called stationary clock that is moving and the moving clock which is stationary and yet it is still report that the time slowed down for the so called moving clock.
There are more questions here then there are answers and the science currently available is completely helpless to answer them. They are in fact more related to philosophy than science. A great but somewhat older book that discusses these very issues in great detail is "The Dancing Wu Li Masters". What a brilliant book! The last chapter is a disapointment though because the author (Zukof if I remember correctly) goes off into eastern mysticism and crap like that but if you want to read one book and end up with a solid working knowledge of Einstein's theories as well as other important aspects of theoretical physics that's the best book I've ever read on it, and I've read many.
Now really. This is the last of this subject I'm going to address. It just isn't what you guys are cracking it up to be. You are reacting to things which 99% of the population of the planet doesn't have the expertise to understand and which have been popularized into characatures of what is really there from a scientific point of view. The heading of the article which is linked to in your post is a perfect example. "Experimental confirmations of time dilation." That is as overstated as anything could be. "Seemingly experimental confirmation of time dialation." might be more accurate but as it is it's overstating the truth.
Resting in Him,
Clete