Fast Space Travel A "Fountain Of Youth'

Press, Volume XCV, Issue 28262, 27 April 1957, Page 11

Fast Space Travel A "Fountain Of Youth'

(Rec. 7 p.m.) WASHINGTON, April 25. A space ship travelling close to the speed of light would constitute a “modern-day fountain of youth,” enabling space travellers to slow their ageing, a University of Wisconsin physicist, Dr. Harold Lewis, said today. Dr. Lewis, in a report to the American Physical Society’s spring meeting, said that in a • round trip to the nearest star—re- • quiring eight years in terms of t the people back on earth—a space J traveller would “age less than one JI year” if his space ship were travels' ling at 185,000 miles a second. JI The speed of light is about 186,30 c miles a second. < He said that if a 175,000-mile-a--.seS° speed ever could be at- £ tained, and “if our space traveller , were to leave a twin brother on •earth, the brother would age the ’■l full eight years waiting for the j traveller to return, so the traveller will be seven years younger ■ than his twin when he sees him [ after the long journey. “He will have found a modernday fountain of youth,” the physicist said. He said that he and his associates had worked out some new equations which “clarify” and give support to concepts which really

were spelled out originally by Dr. Einstein in his theories of relativity. , “According to the theory of relativity, a clock that is moving runs slow compared to a clock that is at rest ... A clock moving at 160,000 miles a second will go half as fast as its stationary counterpart, and one going 185,000 miles a second (close to the speed of light) will go one-tenth as fast.” He said that this effect had been observed and verified for fastmoving “natural clocks,” such as atoms and radioactive particles. The ageing of the human body also constituted a “natural clock.” Thus, he said, in the case of a spaceman, whizzing along at 185,000 miles a second, time would be ‘‘slowed down for him relative tc time for people on earth.” In the eight-year round-trip to Alpha Centauri—the nearest star to earth—the spaceman’s “wristwatch would record only the number of hours it would record in a year on earth; his heart would beat only the number of times it beats in a year on earth; his tissues would age only what they would age in a year; and he would eat only the same number of meals and go to bed only the same number of times he would in a year’s time on earth.”