Problem 44741. You are constantly moving at a speed v faster than your twin brother. How long does it take before you become 1s younger than him according to the theory of relativity?

Created by Mikael Andblom

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You are moving at a speed of v_in (km/h) relative to your twin brother of the exact (even in seconds) same age.

Define: gam = 1/sqrt(1-v^2/c^2) where v is the relative speed in m/s and c is the speed of light in m/s.

According to the theory of relativity (specifically time dilation), a time interval dt for your twin brother equals a time interval of gam*dt for you. For how long must you travel, in years, with the speed v_in in order to become 1 second younger than your twin brother?

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Last Solution submitted on Mar 07, 2019

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James on 6 Nov 2018

Had to cheat to figure out what you were doing. You've got c equal to the speed of light in a vacuum (299792458 m/sec), which is good. However, you're dividing by 336 days per year (60 sec * 60 min * 24 hours * 7 days * 4 weeks * 12 months) instead of either 365 or 365.25 if you want to include leap years.

It's a good problem, but if you're using specific values for a conversion factor that's important to solving the problem, please make sure you spell it out in the problem description.

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math physics relativity time dilation