Would computers accelerated to high speeds compute "faster" from our point of view?

May 04, 2022 Last reply: 4 years ago 49 Replies

Ive found an answer off a different forum here it is if your interested.

1) No, because it's actually going slower from your perspective. In special relativity, "the fastest wristwatch is always your own". 2) Yes, but remember that it's farther away from us now, so it will take some time to get to us (if it was travelling at 0.5c it will take 50% longer to get to us). 3) Mostly in that as an observer the redshift effect would be different. 4) It would be feasible to accelerate to dialate time, but that wouldn't be useful.

Since you only mention acceleration to 0.5c, we'll assume we're dealing with special relativity alone. In this case, your accelerating computer 'loses time' -- its clock moves slower. Computers ultimately work on clock cycles. Thus it is fair to say that, as its clocking is ticking slower -- from your point of view -- the computer on your desk will finish first.

As its clock is ticking slower, it'll take longer to perform the same calculation...from your point of view. The Lorentz transformation gives the ratio by which the travelling clock will slow:

γ−1=(1−v2/c2)−−−−−−−−−√=(1−0.52−−−−−−−√)≈0.86, (or γ≈1.154)

Second question meaningless given the above; if it landed back on your desk after a year's round trip, your desktop machine would be finished, it wouldn't (from the above, if you start 1 Jan one year, start looking for an answer midway through Feb the year after).

Here it gets interesting. If it was orbiting a planet, gravitation comes into play, and with it general relativity. For example, Wikipedia says GPS satellites lose ~7ns/day due to special relativity, but gain ~45ns a day due to general relativity. So instead of cruising at 0.5c, you might want to fling your computer off to 'park' far away from really big planets. Possible? Yes. Feasible? Depends on the length of your calculation, the cost of building the equipment needed to achieve it, and the benefits of the -- possibly marginal -- decrease in calculation time. I suppose one might conceive of some futuristic 'space station supercomputer receiving station' in orbit around a black hole.

You're thinking about gravitational time dilation.

Time machines do exists. If you go in a space ship and travel around the supermassive blackhole in the center of Milky Way, close enough to not fall in it, and then come back to Earth, you just traveled to the future (relative to the space further from you). So in that thinking line, if you want to make a computer run faster by gravitational time dilation, you must be living in an environment of extremely high gravity and put your computer outside this environment, where time runs faster relative to you. A computer orbiting the Earth will be faster than a computer here, but just by a few nanoseconds.

Would we be able to recieve the broadcast from this computer? Yes, the same way we are able to receive pictures sent from Jupiter by Voyager 1 and 2, we would need to count the interference in the transmission but nothing more than stretching/shrinking waves.

It is further up the gravitational potential than one on the ground and in addition it is orbiting at a fair old clip. Both corrections have to be applied to the local clocks in Earth orbit or else GPS wouldn't work.

This is NIST's chapter and verse on the design of GPS receivers and relevant relativistic corrections that are normally applied (and also the various really tiny ones that are not).

formatting link

It goes into some detail on common engineering misconceptions (which ISTR led to the first few satellites going up with a defeat switch on their oscillator correction circuitry because enough electronics engineers didn't believe in relativity.

Gravitational redshift was the last of the notable GR predictions to be experimentally verified in the lab using Mossbauer resonance in the Pound-Rebka experiment:

formatting link

Alas, that's LOCAL coordinate only; the 'retreating galaxies' all have their own 'uniform in every direction' situation, affirming that their motion is the zero velocity coordinate... because the background seen from each point and velocity has different horizon and redshift..

All locations in an expanding universe are the center...

It's clear, from the rest frame of the muon, that the depth of atmosphere it traverses at its relative speed is less, therefore the time elapsed shorter, than the Earthbound observer calculates. The muon and observer agree on relative speed, but neither on distance nor time.

But that's where the observer is at, and that defines their local frame of reference. It may not be an absolute velocity for anybody else - though you would have be a long way away before you could detect a difference - but it is absolute for them.

All locations are at the centre of an observable universe around them but that doesn't prevent the platform you happen to be on having some relative motion wrt that static central position that can be determined by observing the surface of last scattering of the microwave radiation.

The dipole moment of the microwave background is not zero. We are headed towards the Great Attractor in Leo at quite a speed ~1000km/s.

We really are moving in a measurable way wrt to the original baseline coordinate frame of the Big Bang. The data are noisy but there is a ~3mK dipole moment in addition the the uniform 3.7K afterglow.

This is a reasonably nice introduction to the data from the COBE era from SciAm in 1998.

formatting link

Given that the microwave background was discovered in 1964, call it forty years after Relativity (Special and General) were developed, I'd hazard that Relativity does not depend in any way on that background.

Joe Gwinn

Of course it doesn't, but relativity is such a conceptual minefield that it useful to have a reality check.

Please explain to me how you determine speed. Motion without acceleration appears to be "at rest" for the observer in motion. So the time affect is only a relative one where each observer sees the other as slowing down. That was the point of the theory, that the passage of time is relative to the observer.

Apply this theory to a rapidly spinning object. Does time pass differently for the different radius parts? So the center sees the outer parts "ticking" more slowly, such as radioactive decay? If you spin a radioactive object, does this reduce the emitted radiation?

Moving clocks appear to tick more slowly the faster that they are

It certainly does, or this muon collider project that people work on at CERN would make no sense,

Jeroen Belleman

Join the Discussion

Have something to add? Share your thoughts — no account required.

Didn't find your answer?

Ask the community — no account required