Relativity paradox

Please correct me if I got anything wrong:

As you accelerate towards the speed of light, time slows down, and distance forshortens.

A from a photon’s point of view, there IS no spacetime trajectory to transverse…a luminal particle experiences the universe with all points tangent… emission and immediate absorption with no distance nor interval occurring…

…from the lightspeed’s particle’s point of view.

I would figure, from a particle’s point of view, as time slows down for the particle, time speeds up for the rest of the universe.

Some astronaut in a spaceship going .99999999999999999 c could…in theory…look out the window and watch the universe expand, stars ignite and wink out, observe the Big Crunch or Big Rip, all within one human lifetime.

I heard there’s a Twin Paradox that addresses this: as one twin goes near light speed and comes back the other twin ages.
But the near-lightspeed twin observes to stationary twin recede at near lightspeed…so THAT twin out to be the one which ages slower.

The solution to the paradox is the one which is NOT accellerated is the one that ages.

Are objects near the Hubble Horizon…the practical “edge” of the observable universe…accelerating away from us nearer and nearer to the speed of light and thus observably
having time slow down for them?

( I understand redshift…but that’s not the question here.)

In every reference frame, time proceeds at 1 sec/sec. All measurements stay the same. Only from a different reference frame are changes apparent.

This is the plot of Poul Anderson’s Tau Zero, a great hard sf novel published in 1970 (based on a 1967 story). Time works normally for the ship and crew; they get to see the outside universe flash by them faster and faster.

So there’s a lot to unpack here, and I don’t think this will cover everything but here goes with a few things:

So, to start with, from your own point of view, you don’t see time your own time slowing down or speeding up. You experience one second passing as one second. That never changes.

Another is you don’t see time slowing down or speeding up for other people. If you sent a twin out to near the speed of light and the twin had a clock you could see, you would see the twin aging in sync with the clock, i.e. a year on the clock and the twin looks aged one year. What you may or may not see is the clock in sync with your own clock. Acceleration isn’t even relevant to that.

So, let’s set up a little thought experiment. You have two observers A and B in space that somehow start out traveling apart from each other at some constant velocity (less than c of course). No accelerations to get this set up. Each has a clock that can be seen from everywhere else.

First, which one is at rest and which one is moving? The answer: both and neither. There is no preferred frame of reference. You can say that A is at rest and B moving away. Or that B is at rest and A is moving away. Or both are moving away from some common point C. Any or all of those are equally valid ways of seeing things.

With that said, what do the clocks say?

From A’s point of view, their own clock is ticking away at 1 second per second. But they see B’s clock ticking ever so slightly slower.

From B’s point of view, their own clock is ticking away at 1 second per second. But they see A’s clock ticking ever so slightly slower.

From C (that point that sees them both moving away), they see both A and B’s clocks ticking ever so slightly slower than 1 second per second.

And these are all equally valid. And there’s no ‘correct’ answer as to which clock is ‘actually’ ticking slower. You could bring the clocks into the same place but that requires an acceleration. And even there, A can say that B accelerated, while B can say that A accelerated but each would claim a different acceleration vector, which would make all the observations consistent.

So, it is very important in these sorts of problems to specify where you are measuring from, i.e. the frame of reference.

The Hubble Horizon defines the boundary between objects traveling faster or slower than c from some given frame of reference. As above, the frame of reference is rather important. Objects near it can be at any sub-c speed or acceleration, relative to the frame of reference.

So, if we are defining that frame of reference as ‘Earth’ and then posit an object already traveling near c, we would see a clock on that object to be ticking slower than ours while we see our clocks ticking away at 1 second per second. But likewise, from the point of view of that object, it would see clocks on Earth as ticking slower while its own was ticking away at 1 second per second. There’s no ‘correct’ clock in this situation unless you define ‘correct’ to be ‘from my choice of frame of reference’.

And that’s how things work in the real world. We’re on the surface of a spinning planet, in orbit around a star, which orbits around the center of a galaxy, which is itself part of galactic clusters in relative motion from other intergalactic structures. Relative to something out there, we’re traveling at a terrific speed, yet we see our clocks ticking away at 1 second per second. We could estimate how fast/slow our clocks appear to be at that other frame of reference, but that wouldn’t really affect anything in our own.

Ages differently, anyway.

There’s no ‘true’ measurement of time. You can equally say that the solution to the paradox is that the twin that was shot off into space aged more slowly as say that the solution is the twin that stayed on earth aged more rapidly.

Both are equally valid, depending on your frame of reference.

But seeing as most of us are on Earth, it is natural (for humans anyway) to prefer to use Earth as a reference.

This is true but maybe not the easiest way of looking at it.

Consider two people walking around a flat field. They start walking in different directions (say, 45 degrees apart) at the same speed. They will both notice the other person receding from them. They’ll also notice the other person “falling behind”–they have to look over their shoulder to see the other.

Say that one person changes direction, back towards the other one. They’ve “accelerated”, but the important part is that they’re walking in a new direction. And they now see the other ahead of them. Eventually they intersect the other person’s path.

It’s easy to see that this person traveled a longer path. A straight line is the shortest path, while one with a bend in it must be longer. You could pin that on acceleration, but it’s easier to see that it’s just a matter of it not being a straight line path.

The only difference between this example and relativity is that straight paths are always the longest path in time, not the shortest. That’s due to the weirdness of the Minkowski metric (a minus sign on the time dimension), but aside from that it’s the same principle at work.

Another way to look at it is that there are three relevant reference frames, not two. The twin who stays home is in one reference frame. The twin who travels is in another reference frame in his outbound trip, and in a different reference frame in his return trip. You can do the calculations in any of the three reference frames (or in yet another reference frame, if for some reason you want to), and in all of them, you’ll get the same difference in age for the twins when they reunite. But what you can’t do is use “the traveler’s reference frame”, since that isn’t a single reference frame.

And you can make that more obvious by adding another person - one whose path intersects with the traveler (allowing them to synchronize clocks a one instant) and later, with the stay-at-home twin. Now everyone stays in one reference frame at all times, and the “paradox” (the traveller 1’s time from leaving Earth to meeting #3 + traveller 3’s time from meeting to meeting stay-at-home 2 doesn’t equal 2’s time) is less confusing