Hawking (1988: 21):
An equally remarkable consequence of relativity is the way it has revolutionised our ideas of space and time. In Newton’s theory, if a pulse of light is sent from one place to another, different observers would agree on the time that the journey took (since time is absolute), but will not always agree on how far the light travelled (since space is not absolute). Since the speed of the light is just the distance it has travelled divided by the time it has taken, different observers would measure different speeds for the light.
In relativity, on the other hand, all observers must agree on how fast light travels. They still, however, do not agree on the distance the light has travelled, so they must therefore now also disagree over the time it has taken. (The time taken is the distance the light has travelled – which the observers do not agree on – divided by the light’s speed – which they do agree on.) In other words, the theory of relativity put an end to the idea of absolute time! It appeared that each observer must have his own measure of time, as recorded by a clock carried with him, and that identical clocks carried by different observers would not necessarily agree.
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From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, time is a construal of experience of the non-semiotic domain as meaning: a circumstance of the unfolding of processes. The reconstrual of time as a dimension, in physics, means that it is the dimension along which the unfolding of processes is measured.
Relatively different measures of time arise from relatively different intervals of time between each tick of a clock. That is, a relatively slower clock has a relatively longer interval between each tick, and thus measures a relative expansion of the intervals of the time dimension, whereas a relatively faster clock has a relatively shorter interval between each tick, and thus measures a relative contraction of the intervals of the time dimension.
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