Suppose that a spaceship is initially at rest with respect to me. Then, the spaceship accelerates off in some direction trying to reach the speed of light. As I understand it, the time dilation formula tells me that the accelerated ship will experience time dilation interior to it. According to the formula, that means that time will slow down inside the ship. That means that things will appear to move in slow motion, until (at the speed of light) all motion inside the ship would stop. Isn't this the condition for the ship to be at a temperature absolute zero degrees? Time and temperature aren't related in this manner are they?

 

And one more thought... if the time dilation effect is relative, then when his ship reaches the speed of light, is my temperature absolute zero degrees?

 

Regards

Well no, time and temperature are not related in this way. And since you can never reach the speed of light at most the people on the inside of the ship would just be moving very very very slowly. But since temperature is 0 when all movement (including atomic scale movement) ceases, I guess if you did reach c and time was seen to stop it would appear as though the temperature was 0 as well.

 

But if you had a thermometer in the ship, you would not observe that temperature to change, so temperature isn't **really** decreasing, even if it may be measured that way (which im not sure it is).