Monday, September 22, 2014

I became a time traveler when I read about Einstein's "Time Dilation"

The mortal that I am, I have worries in plenty.  It is difficult to put into practice the wonderful words of wisdom from the old country of centuries past:

शोकस्थानसहस्राणि दुःखस्थानशतानि च ।
दिवसे दिवसे मूढमाविशन्ति न पण्डितम् ॥
- महाभारत, अरण्य

Everyday there are thousand reasons to feel sad, hundred reasons to worry.
Such things only bother fools; not wise men.
Mahabharata, Aranya

A fool I am!  Let us see when I become wise ;)

When I decided that I needed a distraction from what seemed like a growing mountain of worries, oddly enough it was not poetry that I turned to.  It was not music that I played.  Instead, I moused over to the Scientific American website.  I suppose there is always that old math and science nerd in me!

Even more interesting was this: Scientific American did not let me down.
Experiments at a particle accelerator have confirmed the "time dilation" effect predicted by Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity
What a wonderful distraction to read about this!

The nerd was curious now.  At least two clocks will be needed to compare the slowing down, which means the question was simple: where was that second clock?
 the researchers used the Experimental Storage Ring, where high-speed particles are stored and studied at the GSI Helmholtz Centre for heavy-ion research in Darmstadt, Germany.
The scientists made the moving clock by accelerating lithium ions to one-third the speed of light. Then they measured a set of transitions within the lithium as electrons hopped between various energy levels. The frequency of the transitions served as the ‘ticking’ of the clock. Transitions within lithium ions that were not moving served as the stationary clock.
The researchers measured the time-dilation effect more precisely than in any previous study, including one published in 2007 by the same research group. “It’s nearly five times better than our old result, and 50 to 100 times better than any other method used by other people to measure relativistic time dilation,” says co-author Gerald Gwinner, a physicist at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada.
I have no idea what these people are talking about anymore.  The frequency of transitions serving as the ticking of a clock?  WTF!

But, that didn't stop me.  As an old Sanskrit couplet noted, the mind is the fastest mode of transport ever, and before I knew it, the mind had moved away from the website and was back in the old country.  I was a student talking and arguing physics with my old friend.

The worries are there, yes.  But, pleasant memories do help.

To live a life is, I suppose, to create enough pleasant memories that can sustain us through.  The third act of the drama of life is all that remains to create memories, and to overcome worries--which will only increase, I imagine.  I wonder what the future holds--if only the mind could travel into the future too!

Source

5 comments:

Mike Hoth said...

I think I might actually be able to explain what they're talking about, although the rust will show in the details.

Because the Earth is slowing down, days take progressively longer to complete. You may have heard of CERN adding leap seconds to fix this in our understanding of time. This is what makes atomic clocks so important and so incredibly precise. Atomic clocks do not watch the sun rise and set.

An atomic clock uses the exact measure of a second, which is not 1/86,400th of a day. Atomic clocks measure how fast an atom of Caesium 133 "bounces" as electrons whirl around the nucleus. 9,192,631,770 of these transitions make up one atomic second.

Thus, measuring the frequency of transitions of an atom (in this case, Lithium) between one atom moving quickly and another at rest should give the exact same result. Unless, of course, time has dilated and the accelerated atom is in a state of slowed time.

Did that help? I can try explaining it again in person if you're on campus, I'm back here myself.

Ramesh said...

@Mike - Excellent explanation understandable even to scientifically challenged person like me. Obviously you are a Prof !!

Let Sriram ruminate on this as he travels wherever he is going to - he will come back infinitesimally younger than me who has been stationary. That might make him youthfully happy :)

Sriram Khé said...

Good to "see" you, Mike ... will see you in my class soon, eh ...

The follow-up post will be about my youthful self, Ramesh ;)

Anne in Salem said...

All I know about time is that it moves too fast for my taste, except when I am in line somewhere. My daughter asked when I studied French, and the answer, to her and my astonishment, was almost 30 years ago. She said, "Wow, you're old. Well, you're not old, but . . . " and couldn't find words to complete her thought. I comforted myself with the thought that, young or old, I have had many experiences and many years for those experiences.

Re: being a nerd. I saw a great t-shirt recently that applies. "Call me a nerd if you like, but I prefer Intellectual Badass."

Sriram Khé said...

Intellectual badasses of the world unite!

Yep, when I was young, I thought people 60 years old were OLD, and now I think otherwise ... Well, I think that 30 year old people now act like 10 year olds ;)