Things like springs/gears, crystal cycles, cesium cycles -- how would these be impacted when they experience time dilation? Would any clocks based on these reflect any more or less of the dilation encountered?
Posted Aug 13, 2011, 9:51 PM UTC
"Clock" is a very loose term. A clock could be as simple as a single unstable subatomic particle (muon, pion, kaon, etc.) Measure or compute its lifetime at rest or at low speeds and then again when it's being spun about in a particle accelerator at breakneck speeds and suddenly it starts taking much longer to decay. It is time itself that is affected, not any particular mechanism or escapement.
Time dilation has nothing to do with clocks. It's the difference in coordinate time between two different frames of reference. We only talk about clocks because that's how we measure timelike intervals, in the same way we measure spacelike intervals.
Or put another way, the effect is independent of what device you use to measure it.