Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to curiouskidsus@theconversation.com.

Why does time change when traveling close to the speed of light? – Timothy, age 11, Shoreview, Minnesota

Imagine you’re in a car driving across the country watching the landscape. A tree in the distance gets closer to your car, passes right by you, then moves off again in the distance behind you.

Of course, you know that tree isn’t actually getting up and walking toward or away from you. It’s you in the car who’s moving toward the tree. The tree is moving only in comparison, or relative, to you – that’s what we physicists call relativity. If you had a friend standing by the tree, they would see you moving toward them at the same speed that you see them moving toward you.

In his 1632 book “Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems,” the astronomer Galileo Galilei first described the principle of relativity – the idea that the universe should behave the same way at all times, even if two people experience an event differently because one is moving in respect to the other.

If you are in a car and toss a ball up in the air, the physical laws acting on it, such as the force of gravity, should be the same as the ones acting on an observer watching from the side of the road. However, while you see the ball as moving up and back down, someone on the side of the road will see it moving toward or away from them as well as up and down.

Albert Einstein much later proposed the idea of what’s now known as special relativity to explain some confusing observations that didn’t have an intuitive explanation at the time. Einstein used the work of many physicists and astronomers in the late 1800s to put together his theory in 1905, starting with two key ingredients: the principle of relativity and the strange observation that the speed of light is the same for every observer and nothing can move faster. Everyone measuring the speed of light will get the same result, no matter where they are or how fast they are moving.

Let’s say you’re in the car driving at 60 miles per hour and your friend is standing by the tree. When they throw a ball toward you at a speed of what they perceive to be 60 miles per hour, you might logically think that you would observe your friend and the tree moving toward you at 60 miles per hour and the ball moving toward you at 120 miles per hour. While that’s really close to the correct value, it’s actually slightly wrong.

This discrepancy between what you might expect by adding the two numbers and the true answer grows as one or both of you move closer to the speed of light. If you were traveling in a rocket moving at 75% of the speed of light and your friend throws the ball at the same speed, you would not see the ball moving toward you at 150% of the speed of light. This is because nothing can move faster than light – the ball would still appear to be moving toward you at less than the speed of light. While this all may seem very strange, there is lots of experimental evidence to back up these observations.

Speed is not the only factor that changes relative to who is making the observation. Another consequence of relativity is the concept of time dilation, whereby people measure different amounts of time passing depending on how fast they move relative to one another.

...continued