Twin paradox

n physics, the twin paradox is a thought experiment in Special Relativity, in which a person who makes a journey into space in a high-speed rocket will return home to find he or she has aged less than an identical twin who stayed on Earth. This result appears puzzling, since the situation seems symmetrical, as the latter twin can be considered to have done the travelling with respect to the former. Hence it is called a "paradox". In fact, there is no contradiction and the apparent paradox is explained within the framework of relativity theory, and has been verified experimentally using precise measurements of clocks flown in aeroplanes.

History

Further information: History of special relativity

In his famous work on Special Relativity in 1905, Albert Einstein predicted that when two clocks were brought together and synchronized, and then one was moved away and brought back, the clock which had undergone the traveling would be found to be lagging behind the clock which had stayed put. Einstein considered this to be a natural consequence of Special Relativity, not a paradox as some suggested, and in 1911, he restated and elaborated on this result in the following form:

If we placed a living organism in a box ... one could arrange that the organism, after any arbitrary lengthy flight, could be returned to its original spot in a scarcely altered condition, while corresponding organisms which had remained in their original positions had already long since given way to new generations. For the moving organism the lengthy time of the journey was a mere instant, provided the motion took place with approximately the speed of light. (in Resnick and Halliday, 1992)

In 1911, Paul Langevin made this concept more vivid and comprehensible by his now-iconic story / thought experiment of the twins, one of whom is an astronaut and the other a homebody. The astronaut brother undertakes a long space journey in a rocket moving at almost the speed of light, while the other remains on Earth. When the traveling brother finally returns to Earth, it is discovered that he is younger than his sibling, that is to say, if the brothers had been carrying the clocks mentioned above, the astronaut’s clock would be found to be lagging behind the clock which had stayed with the Earth-bound brother, meaning that less time had elapsed for the astronaut than for the other. Langevin explained the different aging rates as follows: “Only the traveler has undergone an acceleration that changed the direction of his velocity”. According to Langevin, acceleration is here "absolute", in the sense that it is the cause of the asymmetry (and not of the aging itself).

The significance of the “Twins Paradox” hinges on this one crucial detail of asymmetry between the twins. (NOTE: Everyday English has "acceleration" as referring to "speeding up" only, but in scientific circles it equally refers to "slowing down" so that all the physical changes in speed and direction necessary to get the rocket to come back—slowing down, stopping, turning around, speeding up again—can be covered by the umbrella term "acceleration". This is the way the word is used in this article.)

It should be stressed that neither Einstein nor Langevin considered such results to be literally paradoxical: Einstein only called it "peculiar" while Langevin presented it as evidence for absolute motion. A paradox in logical and scientific usage refers to results which are inherently contradictory, that is, logically impossible, and both men argued that the time differential illustrated by the story of the twins was an entirely natural and explainable phenomenon.

[edit] Specific example

Consider a space ship traveling from Earth to the nearest star system outside of our solar system: a distance d = 4.45 light years away, at a speed v = 0.866c (i.e., 86.6 percent of the speed of light, relative to the Earth). The Earth-based mission control reasons about the journey this way (for convenience in this thought experiment the ship is assumed to immediately attain its full speed upon departure): the round trip will take t = 2d / v = 10.28 years in Earth time (i.e. everybody on earth will be 10.28 years older when the ship returns). The flow of time on the ship and aging of the travelers during their trip will be slowed by the factor \epsilon = \sqrt{1 - v^2/c^2}, the reciprocal of the Lorentz factor. In this case \epsilon = 0.500 \, and the travelers will have aged only 0.500×10.28 = 5.14 years when they return.

The ship's crew members also calculate the particulars of their trip from their perspective. They know that the distant star system and the Earth are moving relative to the ship at speed v during the trip. In their rest frame the distance between the Earth and the star system is εd = 0.5d = 2.23 light years (length contraction), for both the outward and return journeys. Each half of the journey takes 2.23 / v = 2.57 years, and the round trip takes 2×2.57 = 5.14 years. Their calculations show that they will arrive home having aged 5.14 years. The travelers' final calculation is in complete agreement with the calculations of those on Earth, though they experience the trip quite differently.

If a pair of twins are born on the day the ship leaves, and one goes on the journey while the other stays on Earth, they will meet again when the traveler is 5.14 years old and the stay-at-home twin is 10.28 years old. The calculation illustrates the usage of the phenomenon of length contraction and the experimentally verified phenomenon of time dilation to describe and calculate consequences and predictions of Einstein's special theory of relativity.

Courtesy: wikipedia.org