Ants at high speed: would they age slower or faster?

[Myuncle]

Has anyone thought or tried an experiment with ants (or much smaller creatures) travelling at very high speed? Are they going to age slower or faster? Is it feasible? Would this be enough to prove Einstein right or wrong?

[Moontanman]

Near the speed of light they would age slower just like anything else, atomic particles have much longer lives than particles at rest. The effect of time dilation is real, it can be measured, So far Einstein rules... the detractors drool

[swansont]

We don't have the capability of testing this with ants. We don't have spacecraft which travel fast enough for an appreciable shift that could be sensed by animals in a reasonable length of time.

 

The ISS, for example, travels at less than 8 km/s, which gives a frequency shift from dilation of a few parts in 10^10, or about 30 microseconds per day. So in ~100 years, ISS passengers will have lost one second as compared to earth time. (This is ignoring gravitational time dilation, which makes the shift slightly smaller)

[HiggsBoson]

The problem is not that we cannot test on humans (in this case), but that we cannot go fast enough to see a distinguishable effect on living organisms. A test has been done with atomic clocks on rockets orbiting the Earth, and we have seen a slight variation in time, agreeing with Einstein's predictions. If this were possible though, the ants on the rocket would age slower than those on earth. This is similar to a thought experiment known as the Twin Paradox (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_paradox). The change in time happens during acceleration and deceleration and is known as the desynchronization effect.

[ydoaPs]

We don't have the capability of testing this with ants. We don't have spacecraft which travel fast enough for an appreciable shift that could be sensed by animals in a reasonable length of time.

 

The ISS, for example, travels at less than 8 km/s, which gives a frequency shift from dilation of a few parts in 10^10, or about 30 microseconds per day. So in ~100 years, ISS passengers will have lost one second as compared to earth time. (This is ignoring gravitational time dilation, which makes the shift slightly smaller)

Could we not have a round trip vessel with a constant acceleration of 1g? Send it out(takes about a year to approach the speed of light at constant 1g, iirc) and count the number of generations when it returns?

[Sisyphus]

Could we not have a round trip vessel with a constant acceleration of 1g? Send it out(takes about a year to approach the speed of light at constant 1g, iirc) and count the number of generations when it returns?

 

But 1g is an enormous amount of acceleration to maintain for a year. For comparison, the space shuttle has a max acceleration of 3G at takeoff, and it burns off almost all of its vast external fuel tanks in a few minutes.

[ydoaPs]

But 1g is an enormous amount of acceleration to maintain for a year. For comparison, the space shuttle has a max acceleration of 3G at takeoff, and it burns off almost all of its vast external fuel tanks in a few minutes.

Fighting atmosphere and gravity, right? Isn't the point of Ion Engines that they produce a small constant acceleration rather than a short lived large one such as with chemical rockets?

[Sisyphus]

Fighting atmosphere and gravity, right? Isn't the point of Ion Engines that they produce a small constant acceleration rather than a short lived large one such as with chemical rockets?

 

Well right, so 4G of thrust fighting 1G of gravity for 3G of acceleration at takeoff (and no initial air resistance). Ion engines we have now are 10 times as efficient as chemical rockets, but are still three orders of magnitude too weak to accelerate anything at 1G.

[ydoaPs]

Well right, so 4G of thrust fighting 1G of gravity for 3G of acceleration at takeoff (and no initial air resistance). Ion engines we have now are 10 times as efficient as chemical rockets, but are still three orders of magnitude too weak to accelerate anything at 1G.

Hm.....I'm not sure it's beyond current technological capability to design a rocket capable of accelerating the ants and associated equipment at 1g constantly, though, I'm not really aware of the current technological status of humanity in this area.

[insane_alien]

well, your ion engines can't even accelerate themselves at 1g.

 

you're talking millinewtons per kilogram at best.

[ydoaPs]

well, your ion engines can't even accelerate themselves at 1g.

 

you're talking millinewtons per kilogram at best.

What would be better to accelerate constantly?

[Mr Skeptic]

Just put your ant in a charged container in a particle accelerator.

[ydoaPs]

Just put your ant in a charged container in a particle accelerator.

That's an awesome experiment. Let's do it!