Does a clock actually move slower when travelling close to the speed of light?
ABSOLUTELY! A clock in a moving frame really does tick slower. This has been shown experimentally. Muons are created in the upper atmosphere of earth, when high energy particles hit air moluecules. The Muons have a very short lifetime. It should be impossible for any to last long enough to reach earth from the top of the atmosphere. However, muons can be detected at the earth’s surface. They make it to the earth’s surface because they are traveling at relativistic speeds and experience time dilation. There is a famous problem called the “Light Clock”( check out http://galileoandeinstein.physics.virgin… that beautifully demonstrates that time passes slower in a moving reference frame. This happens because the speed of light is the same in all reference frames. The basic idea is like this: You could arrange to send a pulse of light to a mirror, have that pulse be reflected by the mirror,
