Einstein Showed That Time Is Relative. But … Why Is It?
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Summary
In theory, if you’re driving a car at half the speed of light and turn on the headlights, both you and a passerby would see the light travelling at c.
This theory underpins Albert Einstein’s theory of special relativity, which dictates that the speed of light is a constant, meaning the motion of the light source and the relative motion of the observers does not change the velocity.
Additionally, special relativity theory indicates that if the speed of light is a universal constant, then time is relative.
This means that the faster you move through space, the slower you move through time, hence the clock on a hyper-speed spaceship would literally tick slower, and if you were in that ship, you would age more slowly than your friends back on Earth.
This theory relating to the speed of light and time dilation occurs because light is an electromagnetic wave, and electromagnetic waves can propagate through a vacuum.
The self-propagating nature of electromagnetic waves is determined by Maxwell’s equations, which indicate that the speed of light is the same for all observers, provided that both reference frames are accepted as equally valid.