The other day we were driving along and I found out that a friend of mine’s father is a commercial airline pilot. We chatted about it for a while - apparently his mother was an air hostess and that’s how they met - and I mentioned that he must have time travelled quite a bit.
I wasn’t being facetious by any means. It has always been a fascination of mine that Einstein’s special relativity is something you experience on long plane trips. During my physics A-Level I learned that one of the verifications of relativity was that some researchers placed took two synchronised atomic clocks and placed one of a boeing jet. they flew it around the world a few times at regular commerical speeds and low and behold when it came back the travelling clock had experienced less time than the stationary one.
Like the astronauts in Planet of the Apes, the moving clock had experienced time dilation and lost a few nanoseconds compare to its Earthbound counterpart. I suggest that my friend’s father would had experienced his fare share of time dilation himself, albeit only on the order of nanoseconds.
So here’s a little form to let you figure out how much time you’ve saved in the past year:
So there you are, have a go. See how many nanoseconds you can add to your life by flying endlessly around the world.
June 14th, 2007 at 11:05 am
Rob, could you add a field for “high speed train” travel?
June 14th, 2007 at 11:55 am
Yes, I could do that. I will work on it. I’m learning PHP you see and this is something of an experiment to that end. Anyone got any other suggestions of types of speediness I could put in? i may as well do the lot while I’m there.
June 14th, 2007 at 5:59 pm
I guess it is probably overkill to add in general relativistic corrections for the altitude of planes.
June 14th, 2007 at 6:36 pm
Interesting! But of course, an airplane is high off the ground, where time runs a little more quickly. You should put that in as well, so it counteracts the effect of the velocity somewhat.
June 15th, 2007 at 12:00 am
That’s great! Now to contemplate what I could do with the 4.7 nanoseconds I’ve saved!
June 15th, 2007 at 6:09 pm
Now - the only problem here is, won’t it sometimes LOSE time for the plane traveler when their direction of travel acts to cancel some of the existing rotation and orbital velocity?
April 8th, 2008 at 10:04 am
This post is currently not working properly but will soon be replaced by a newer version anyway. Bear with me.
July 15th, 2008 at 8:06 pm
It also depends on whether you go east or west, just as Shawn asked, since we’re not in an inertial frame. Time slows down if you go east, but it speeds up if you go west.