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Mikael Lindberg

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Is time really relative or is our understanding of how light propagates itself through space wrong?

I am not quite sure how i want to formulate this question beyond the obvious.

The assumption is that the speed of light is constant regardless of the speed at which the observer is traveling meaning both space and time have to be variable.
Is gravitational time dilation not just a slowing down of "that by which we measure time" and as such is our definition of time incorrect?

Redshift is an indication that the light source is moving away from the observer.
Likewise an observer moving away from the light source would produce the same effect.
If we instead assume that time is constant the speed if light cannot be.

Assuming that, it strikes me that perhaps light does not propagate itself through space in a straight line and that the different observed wavelengths would be indicative of this.
If this was instead true, would it not explain how light while covering a distance in the same amount of time is distorted (contorted is perhaps a better word?) and shifted towards the red or blue spectrum.

I've had this idea in my head for weeks now and i just had to get it out. I may be totally rambling but in either case i think it's an interesting idea and questioning what we take for granted is a somewhat a hobby of mine.

The premise is simply that our understanding of how light propagates itself through space and the conclusions that follow may be wrong.


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    May 2 2012: Hello Mikael,

    It is indeed a hard concept to grasp, and since time dilation goes hand in hand with space contraction in special relativity, it makes for a very confusing picture (what if light is not traveling at the same speed but the time effects are purely a result of this space contraction?)

    But a great example confirming the relativity of time comes from our dear and beloved GPS receivers. They would not work if the satellites on which they depend were not designed to take into account both the slowing down of time caused by the speed of the movement around the earth, and the speeding up of time caused by the satellites being further away form the earth's center. And no, these two do not cancel each other. It turns out that the speeding is more than the slowing, so clocks in the satellites will tick a little faster than identical clocks in the ground.

    In order to maintain them synchronized, the clocks in the satellites are designed to tick slower when they are on the ground, in the precise amount predicted by Einstein's Relativity, in that way, they DO click in perfect synchrony once they are sent up there and whole system is working

    Here is a link with a much better explanation



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