Muon Lifetime in Cosmic Rays: Muons, created in the upper atmosphere, decay so quickly they shouldn’t reach Earth’s surface. Yet, vast numbers do. This is explained by special relativity: traveling near light speed, their internal clocks slow down (time dilation), allowing them to survive the journey. From the muon’s perspective, length contraction shortens the distance. This natural experiment confirms Einstein’s predictions. Muons effectively “time travel” into the future by experiencing microseconds instead of milliseconds. It’s a continuous, observable proof of relativistic time effects, demonstrating that high-speed particles experience time differently, a phenomenon crucial to particle physics and cosmic ray studies.
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