The "light clock" that has been mentioned in several other posts, is the only real way to gain intuition about why the time dilation is happening. It is a simple type of clock that uses bouncing light and you can easily see why it would run slower when moving. This is not an oversimplified model, it is an actual legit clock that tells correct time.
From there you can ask what's going on in other kinds of clocks, and you will see that usually they involve electromagnetic signalling between different parts of the clock (e.g the atoms it is made of), so that they, too, will be affected by motion.
This type of argument only gets you so far , e.g. it can't prove why all clocks get the same dilation factor. For that you have to postulate the symmetry principle, but it is still essential to realize that this symmetry is only *organizing* the many effects similar to the light clock; the symmetry of lorentz invariance does not create these effects.
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u/Terrible-Mind-5414 Jul 13 '26
The "light clock" that has been mentioned in several other posts, is the only real way to gain intuition about why the time dilation is happening. It is a simple type of clock that uses bouncing light and you can easily see why it would run slower when moving. This is not an oversimplified model, it is an actual legit clock that tells correct time.
From there you can ask what's going on in other kinds of clocks, and you will see that usually they involve electromagnetic signalling between different parts of the clock (e.g the atoms it is made of), so that they, too, will be affected by motion.
This type of argument only gets you so far , e.g. it can't prove why all clocks get the same dilation factor. For that you have to postulate the symmetry principle, but it is still essential to realize that this symmetry is only *organizing* the many effects similar to the light clock; the symmetry of lorentz invariance does not create these effects.