TWIN PARADOX

Contents

1 History

2 Specific examples

3 Resolution of the paradox in special relativity

4 What it looks like: the relativistic Doppler shift

4.1 The asymmetry in the Doppler shifted images

5 Calculation of elapsed time from the Doppler diagram

5.1 The distinction between what they see and what they calculate

5.2 Simultaneity in the Doppler shift calculation

6 Viewpoint of the traveling twin

7 Difference in elapsed time as a result of differences in twins' space-time paths

8 Difference in elapsed times: how to calculate it from the ship

9 A rotational version

10 See also

11 Notes

12 References

13 Further reading

14 External links
 Twin Paradox
In physics, the twin paradox is a thought experiment in special relativity, in which a
twin makes a journey into space in a high-speed rocket and returns home to find he
has aged less than his identical twin that stayed on Earth. This result appears
puzzling because each twin sees the other twin as traveling, and so, according to a
naive application of time dilation, each should paradoxically find the other to have
aged more slowly. In fact, the result is not a paradox in the true sense, since it can
be resolved within the standard framework of special relativity. The effect has been
verified experimentally using precise measurements of clocks flown in airplanes and
satellites.

Starting with Paul Langevin in 1911, there have been numerous explanations of this
paradox, many based upon there being no contradiction because there is no
symmetry—only one twin has undergone acceleration and deceleration, thus
differentiating the two cases. One version of the asymmetry argument made by
Max von Laue in 1913 is that the traveling twin uses two inertial frames: one on the
way up and the other on the way down. So switching frames is the cause of the
difference, not acceleration per se.

Other explanations account for the effects of acceleration. Einstein, Born and Moller
invoked gravitational time dilation to explain the aging based upon the effects of
acceleration. Both gravitational time dilation and special relativity can be used to
explain the Hafele-Keating experiment on time dilation using precise measurements
of clocks flown in airplanes.

History:

In his famous work on special relativity in 1905, Albert Einstein predicted that when
two clocks were brought together and synchronized, and then one was moved away
and brought back, the clock which had undergone the traveling would be found to
be lagging behind the clock which had stayed put. Einstein considered this to be a
natural consequence of special relativity, not a paradox as some suggested, and in
1911, he restated and elaborated on this result in the below form (with physicist
Robert Resnick's comments following Einstein's).

"If we placed a living organism in a box ... one could arrange that the organism,
after any arbitrary lengthy flight, could be returned to its original spot in a scarcely
altered condition, while corresponding organisms which had remained in their
original positions had already long since given way to new generations. For the
moving organism, the lengthy time of the journey was a mere instant, provided the
motion took place with approximately the speed of light."

If the stationary organism is a man and the traveling one is his twin, then the
traveler returns home to find his twin brother much aged compared to he himself.
The paradox centers on the contention that, in relativity, either twin could regard
the other as the traveler, in which case each should find the other younger—a
logical contradiction. This contention assumes that the twins' situations are
symmetrical and interchangeable, an assumption that is not correct. Furthermore,
the accessible experiments have been done and support Einstein's prediction. ...

In 1911, Paul Langevin gave a "striking example” by describing the story of a

traveler making a trip at a Lorentz factor of γ = 100. The traveler remains in a
projectile for one year of his time, and then reverses direction. Upon return, the
traveler will find that he has aged two years, while 200 years have passed on Earth.
During the trip, both the traveler and Earth keep sending signals to each other at a
constant rate, which places Langevin's story among the Doppler shift versions of
the twin paradox. The relativistic effects upon the signal rates are used to account
for the different aging rates. The "asymmetry due to what only the traveler
underwent is used to explain why there is any difference at all, because "every
change of velocity, all acceleration has an absolute meaning".

Max von Laue wrote in 1913 that the asymmetric aging is completely accounted by
the fact that the astronaut twin travels in two separate frames, while the earth twin
remains in one frame. Using Minkowski's space-time formalism, Laue went on to
demonstrate that the world lines of the inertially moving bodies maximize the
proper time elapsed between two events.

Neither Einstein nor Langevin considered such results to be literally paradoxical:

Einstein only called it "peculiar" while Langevin presented it as consequence of
absolute acceleration. A paradox in logical and scientific usage refers to results
which are inherently contradictory, that is, logically impossible, and both men
argued that out of the time differential illustrated by the story of the twins no self-
contradiction could be constructed. In other words, neither Einstein nor Langevin
saw the story of the twins as constituting a challenge to the self-consistency of
relativistic physics.

Specific example:
Consider a space ship traveling from Earth to the nearest star system outside of our
solar system: a distance d = 4.45 light years away, at a speed v = 0.866c (i.e., 86.6
percent of the speed of light). The Earth-based mission control reasons about the
journey this way (for convenience in this thought experiment the ship is assumed to
attain its full speed immediately upon departure): the round trip will take t = 2d / v
= 10.28 years in Earth time (i.e. everybody on earth will be 10.28 years older when
the ship returns). The amount of time as measured on the ship's clocks and the
ageing of the travelers during their trip will be reduced by the factor , the reciprocal
of the Lorentz factor. In this case and the travelers will have aged only 0.500×10.28
= 5.14 years when they return.

The ship's crew members also calculate the particulars of their trip from their
perspective. They know that the distant star system and the Earth are moving
relative to the ship at speed v during the trip. In their rest frame the distance
between the Earth and the star system is εd = 0.5d = 2.23 light years (length
contraction), for both the outward and return journeys. Each half of the journey
takes 2.23 / v = 2.57 years, and the round trip takes 2×2.57 = 5.14 years. Their
calculations show that they will arrive home having aged 5.14 years. The travelers'
final calculation is in complete agreement with the calculations of those on Earth,
though they experience the trip quite differently.

If a pair of twins is born on the day the ship leaves, and one goes on the journey
while the other stays on Earth, they will meet again when the traveler is 5.14 years
old and the stay-at-home twin is 10.28 years old. The calculation illustrates the
usage of the phenomenon of length contraction and the experimentally verified
phenomenon of time dilation to describe and calculate consequences and
predictions of Einstein's special theory of relativity.

Resolution of the paradox in special relativity:

The standard textbook approach treats the twin paradox as a straightforward

application of special relativity. Here the Earth and the ship are not in a symmetrical
relationship: the ship has a turnaround in which it undergoes non-inertial motion,
while the Earth has no such turnaround. Since there is no symmetry, it is not
paradoxical if one twin is younger than the other. Nevertheless it is still useful to
show that special relativity is self-consistent, and how the calculation is done from
the standpoint of the traveling twin.
Special relativity does not claim that all observers are equivalent, only that all
observers at rest in inertial reference frames are equivalent. But the space ship
jumps frames (accelerates) when it performs a U-turn. In contrast, the twin who
stays home remains in the same inertial frame for the whole duration of his
brother's flight. No accelerating or decelerating forces apply to the homebound

twin. b

There are indeed not two but three relevant inertial frames: the one in which the
stay-at-home twin remains at rest, the one in which the traveling twin is at rest on
his outward trip, and the one in which he is at rest on his way home. It is during the
acceleration at the U-turn that the traveling twin switches frames. That is when he
must adjust his calculated age of the twin at rest.

In special relativity there is no concept of absolute present. A present is defined as

a set of events that are simultaneous from the point of view of a given observer.
The notion of simultaneity depends on the frame of reference (see relativity of
simultaneity), so switching between frames requires an adjustment in the definition
of the present. If one imagines a present as a (three-dimensional) simultaneity
plane in Minkowski space, then switching frames results in changing the inclination
of the plane.

Minkowski diagram of the twin paradox in the space-time diagram on the right,
drawn for the reference frame of the stay-at-home twin, that twin's world line
coincides with the vertical axis (his position is constant in space, moving only in
time). On the first leg of the trip, the second twin moves to the right (black sloped
line); and on the second leg, back to the left. Blue lines show the planes of
simultaneity for the traveling twin during the first leg of the journey; red lines,
during the second leg. Just before turnaround, the traveling twin calculates the age
of the resting twin by measuring the interval along the vertical axis from the origin
to the upper blue line. Just after turnaround, if he recalculates, he'll measure the
interval from the origin to the lower red line. In a sense, during the U-turn the plane
of simultaneity jumps from blue to red and very quickly sweeps over a large
segment of the world line of the resting twin. The traveling twin reckons that there
has been a jump discontinuity in the age of the resting twin.

The twin paradox illustrates a feature of the special relativistic space-time model,
the Minkowski space. The world lines of the inertially moving bodies are the
geodesics of Minkowskian space-time. In Minkowski geometry the world lines of
inertially moving bodies maximize the proper time elapsed between two events.

What it looks like: the relativistic Doppler shift

Now, how would each twin observe the other during the trip? Or, if each twin always
carried a clock indicating his age, what time would each see in the image of their
distant twin and his clock? The solution to this observational problem can be found
in the relativistic Doppler Effect. The frequency of clock-ticks which one sees from a
source with rest frequency frest is

When the source is moving directly away (a reduction in frequency; "red-shifted").

When the source is coming directly back, the observed frequency is higher ("blue-
shifted") and given by

This combines the effects of time dilation (reduction in source frequency due to
motion by factor ε) and the Doppler shift in received frequency by factor (1 v/c) −1,
which would apply even for velocity-independent clock rates. For the example case
above where v / c = 0.866, the high and low frequencies received are 3.732 and
0.268 times the rest frequency. That is, both twins would see the images of their
sibling aging at a rate only 0.268 times their own rate, or expressed the other way,
they would both measure their own aging rate as being 3.732 that of their twin. In
other words, each twin will see that for each hour that passes for them, their twin
experiences just over 16 minutes.
Light paths for images exchanged during trip

Left: Earth to ship. Right: Ship to Earth.

Red lines indicate low frequency images are received

Blue lines indicate high frequency images are received

The x − t (space-time) diagrams at left show the paths of light signals traveling
between Earth and ship (1st diagram) and between ship and Earth (2nd diagram).
These signals carry the images of each twin and his age-clock to the other twin. The
vertical black line is the Earth's path through space time and the other two sides of
the triangle show the ship's path through space time (as in the Minkowski diagram
above). As far as the sender is concerned, he transmits these at equal intervals
(say, once an hour) according to his own clock; but according to the clock of the
twin receiving these signals, they are not being received at equal intervals.

After the ship has reached its cruising speed of 0.866 c, each twin would see 1
second pass in the received image of the other twin for every 3.73 seconds of his
own time. That is, each would see the image of the other's clock going slow, not just
slow by the ε factor, but even slower because of the Doppler observational effect.
This is shown in the figures by red light paths. At some point, the images received
by each twin change so that each would see 3.73 seconds pass in the image for
every second of his own time. That is, the received signal has been increased in
frequency by the Doppler shift. These high frequency images are shown in the
figures by blue light paths.

The asymmetry in the Doppler shifted images:

The asymmetry between the earth and the space ship is manifested in this diagram
by the fact that more blue-shifted (fast aging) images are received by the Ship. Put
another way, the space ship sees the image change from a red-shift (slower aging
of the image) to a blue-shift (faster aging of the image) at the mid-point of its trip
(at the turnaround, 2.57 years after departure); the Earth sees the image of the ship
change from red-shift to blue shift after 9.59 years (almost at the end of the period
that the ship is absent). In the next section, one will see another asymmetry in the
images: the Earth twin sees the ship twin age by the same amount in the red and
blue shifted images; the ship twin sees the Earth twin age by different amounts in
the red and blue shifted images.

Calculation of elapsed time from the Doppler diagram:

The twin on the ship sees low frequency (red) images for 2.57 years. During that
time, he would see the Earth twin in the image grow older by 2.57/3.73 = 0.69
years. He then sees high frequency (blue) images for the remaining 2.57 years of
his trip. During that time, he would see the Earth twin in the image grow older by
2.57×3.73 = 9.59 years. When the journey is finished, the image of the Earth twin
has aged by 0.69 + 9.59 = 10.28 years.

The Earth twin sees 9.59 years of slow (red) images of the ship twin, during which
the ship twin ages (in the image) by 9.59/3.73 = 2.57 years. He then sees fast
(blue) images for the remaining 0.69 years until the ship returns. In the fast images,
the ship twin ages by 0.69×3.73 = 2.57 years. The total aging of the ship twin in
the images received by Earth is 2.57+2.57 = 5.14 years, so the ship twin returns
younger (5.14 years as opposed to 10.28 years on Earth).

The distinction between what they see and what they calculate:

To avoid confusion, note the distinction between what each twin sees, and what
each would calculate. Each sees an image of his twin which he knows originated at
a previous time and which he knows is Doppler shifted. He does not take the
elapsed time in the image, as the age of his twin now. And he does not confuse the
rate at which the image is aging with the rate at which his twin was aging when the
image was transmitted.

If he wants to calculate when his twin was the age shown in the image (i.e.. how old
he himself was then), he has to determine how far away his twin was, when the
signal was emitted—in other words, he has to consider simultaneity for a distant
event.

If he wants to calculate how fast his twin was aging when the image was
transmitted he adjusts for the Doppler shift. For example, when he receives high
frequency images (showing his twin aging rapidly), with frequency , he does not
conclude that the twin was aging that rapidly when the image was generated, any
more than he concludes that the siren of an ambulance is emitting the frequency he
hears. He knows that the Doppler Effect has increased the image frequency by the
factor. He calculates therefore that his twin was aging at the rate of

When the image was emitted. A similar calculation reveals that his twin was aging
at the same reduced rate of in all low frequency images.

Simultaneity in the Doppler shift calculation:

It may be difficult to see where simultaneity came into the Doppler shift calculation,
and indeed the calculation is often preferred because one does not have to worry
about simultaneity. As seen above, the ship twin can convert his received Doppler-
shifted rate to a slower rate of the clock of the distant clock for both red and blue
images. If he ignores simultaneity, he might say his twin was aging at the reduced
rate throughout the journey and therefore should be younger than him. He is now
back to square one, and has to take into account the change in his notion of
simultaneity at the turn around. The rate he can calculate for the image (corrected
for Doppler Effect) is the rate of the Earth twin's clock at the moment it was sent,
not at the moment it was received. Since he receives an unequal number of red and
blue shifted images, he should realize that the red and blue shifted emissions were
not emitted over equal time periods for the Earth twin, and therefore he must
account for simultaneity at a distance.

Viewpoint of the traveling twin:

During the turnaround, the traveling twin is in an accelerated reference frame.
According to the equivalence principle, the traveling twin may analyze the
turnaround phase as if the stay-at-home twin were freely falling in a gravitational
field and as if the traveling twin were stationary. A 1918 paper by Einstein presents
a conceptual sketch of the idea. From the viewpoint of the traveler, a calculation for
each separate leg, ignoring the turnaround, leads to a result in which the Earth
clocks age less than the traveler. For example, if the Earth clocks age 1 day less on
each leg, the amount that the Earth clocks will lag behind amounts to 2 days. The
physical description of what happens at turnaround has to produce a contrary effect
of double that amount: 4 days' advancing of the Earth clocks. Then the traveler's
clock will end up with a net 2-day delay on the Earth clocks, in agreement with
calculations done in the frame of the stay-at-home twin.

The mechanism for the advancing of the stay-at-home twin's clock is gravitational
time dilation. When an observer finds that inertially moving objects are being
accelerated with respect to themselves, those objects are in a gravitational field
insofar as relativity is concerned. For the traveling twin at turnaround, this
gravitational field fills the universe. In a weak field approximation, clocks tick at a
rate of t' = t (1 + Φ / c2) where Φ is the difference in gravitational potential. In this
case, Φ = gh where ‘g’ is the acceleration of the traveling observer during
turnaround and h is the distance to the stay-at-home twin. The rocket is firing
towards the stay-at-home twin, thereby placing that twin at a higher gravitational
potential. Due to the large distance between the twins, the stay-at-home twin's
clocks will appear to be sped up enough to account for the difference in proper
times experienced by the twins. It is no accident that this speed-up is enough to
account for the simultaneity shift described above. The general relativity solution
for a static homogeneous gravitational field and the special relativity solution for
finite acceleration produce identical results.

Difference in elapsed time as a result of differences in twins' space-time paths

The following paragraph shows several things:

How to employ a precise mathematical approach in calculating the differences in

the elapsed time

How to prove exactly the dependency of the elapsed time on the different paths
taken through space-time by the two twins

How to quantify the differences in elapsed time

How to calculate proper time as a function (integral) of coordinate time

Let clock K be associated with the "stay at home twin". Let clock K' be associated
with the rocket that makes the trip. At the departure event both clocks are set to 0.

Phase 1: Rocket (with clock K') embarks with constant proper acceleration a during
a time Ta as measured by clock K until it reaches some velocity V.

Phase 2: Rocket keeps coasting at velocity V during some time Tc according to clock
K.

Phase 3: Rocket fires its engines in the opposite direction of K during a time Ta
according to clock K until it is at rest with respect to clock K. The constant proper
acceleration has the value -a, in other words the rocket is decelerating.

Phase 4: Rocket keeps firing its engines in the opposite direction of K, during the
same time Ta according to clock K, until K' regains the same speed V with respect
to K, but now towards K (with velocity -V).

Phase 5: Rocket keeps coasting towards K at speed V during the same time Tc
according to clock K.

Phase 6: Rocket again fires its engines in the direction of K, so it decelerates with a
constant proper acceleration ‘a’ during a time Ta, still according to clock K, until
both clocks reunite.

Knowing that the clock K remains inertial (stationary), the total accumulated proper
time Δτ of clock K' will be given by the integral function of coordinate time Δt

d = 4.45

t = 2d / v = 10.28

εd = 0.5d = 2.23
t' = t(1 + Φ / c2)

Integration

Phase 1

Phase 2
Phase 3
Phase 4

Phase 5
Phase 6

Where ‘a’ is the proper acceleration, felt by clock K' during the acceleration phase(s) and where
the following relations hold between V, ‘a’ and Ta:

So the traveling clock K' will show an elapsed time of

Which can be expressed as

Whereas the stationary clock K shows an elapsed time of

Which is, for every possible value of a, Ta, Tc and V, larger than the reading of clock K':