system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
If time is measured using mechanical or atomic means, traveling in a very fast reference frame, why is it that time itself slows down instead of the operation of the component used to measure time?

Is it just how time is defined, by its measurement?  Why isn't it just that these time measuring devices' operation is affected by going super fast instead of the nature of time itself?  For example, the gears moving in a clock just move more slowly instead of time slowing down.

Not sure this is worded correctly so hopefully my point gets across.
gpt
A muon is an unstable subatomic particle. You can think of it as being kind of like a fat electron. They're produced in all sorts of scattering events, but once they appear, they tend only to hang around for about two millionths of a second before decaying into an electron and a pair of neutrinos.

Muons are produced very frequently — millions upon millions of them a second — in cosmic-ray interactions. A high-energy proton comes screaming out of space and intersects our atmosphere. It scatters off a gas molecule and decays, and one of the decay products that can appear is a muon.

Because muons only last two microseconds, we shouldn't detect any at sea level. They should decay long before they get from the upper atmosphere to the ground.

But we do detect them. We detect *thousands* of them per square yard every minute.

How can this be? Because the muon is time-dilated by virtue of how fast it's moving relative to you, sitting on the surface of the Earth. In its frame, the muon only lasts for about two microseconds, on average, before decaying. In the frame of a detector at sea level, it lasts much longer.

So no, it's not about clocks. It's about time itself.