Space-time
Warning: This is a technical article, and might not be interesting to you. This is based on real techniques and theories that are used in everyday physics, but some things might be changed a bit to fit into the world I've been creating.
When thinking about time, one would imagine it to be a constant, and always the same no matter where you are in the universe. It's universal. The same with space - like the circumference of Earth, the length from the Earth to the moon and so on - but this way of seeing space and time is outdated. If we instead look at space and time as being united instead of two separate laws of the universe, we get what we call space-time.
When thinking about time, one would imagine it to be a constant, and always the same no matter where you are in the universe. It's universal. The same with space - like the circumference of Earth, the length from the Earth to the moon and so on - but this way of seeing space and time is outdated. If we instead look at space and time as being united instead of two separate laws of the universe, we get what we call space-time.
Imagine an observer (A) standing on earth looking to the sky. Another observer (B) is flying fast in a spaceship and goes right past observer A. They both have perfectly synchronized watches with them.
What does observer B see compared to observer A? Intuitively the answer would be "Well... Isn't it just the same?", but it isn't.
One of them will experience length shortening, and the other will experience a time extension. This is partly due to the speed of observer B, as he is in a moving coordinate system compared to his friend A.
Looking at the figure (on the right) observer A is the coordinate system called (x,t) and observer B is in the moving coordinate system (B is moving in space over time) called (x',t'). The diagonal line in with an angle of 45 degrees represents the speed of light. Nothing exceeds the speed of light, so imagine that as a limit for all moving things.
Just by looking at the figure, it looks like there is a difference in the length of the ship as described above (length shortening). When looking at the ship moving, it looks shorter from the earth with a factor called the gamma factor.
The spaceship in the two coordinate systems makes a right-angled triangle where you are able to use Pythagoras theorem. But not the way it's usually taught. In euclidian coordinates following is correct: a2 + b2 = c2 . But in space-time coordinates a different theorem stands correct: a2 - b2 = c2. We then get that the
by CatRobi
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