Alex McColgan

When an object travels at high enough speeds, time slows down for it.

At least, it does from the perspective of an outside observer at rest.

For the object itself, time seems to go the same speed, in a principle known as time dilation.

And, curiously, if you travel at light speed, from your perspective, you'd be ticking along as normal, but everything else would suddenly be slowing down, not you.

feels the universe shouldn't work this way, with both sides thinking the other is moving slower.

But this does appear to be the fundamental rule of our universe.

An object's rate of travel through time seems to be down to the relative position of your perspective.

There is no true rate at which things travel through time.

Weird already, but I wonder if you are aware of just how far this principle goes.

The implications get pretty mind-bending.

Let's talk about a second element of special relativity, length contraction.

This is a bit of a weird one.

From the point of view of an outside observer at rest, if an object were to travel at a large enough percentage of the speed of light, the observer would start to see the object flatten.

A ball would become a giant pancake.

This flattening occurs in the direction the objects travel, and it has been shown to occur both mathematically and experimentally.

We fired protons in the Large Hadron Collider, and their collision patterns only make sense if this pancaking is occurring.

It's very weird, but it does seem to be real.

Multiple experiments seem to confirm length contraction, including the Kennedy-Thorndike experiment and experiments with muon decay, where muon particles falling through our atmosphere don't decay as fast as they should thanks to this effect.

It's worth noting, however, that just like with time dilation, length contraction is a matter of perspective.

If you were the thing that had been accelerated to near the speed of light, you would not see yourself contract.