If light travels at 670 million miles per hour, then that means in one hour it will travel 670 million miles. At 2 hours it will travel 1214 million miles etc. This to me sounds like a measurement of time, just on such a huge scale that we can’t comprehend it. But in the grand scheme of the cosmos this is not that crazy of a scale. I would think it’s just saying light doesn’t experience time *relative* to us. But Einstein says no- no matter what, light’s speed doesn’t change and, what, relativity just doesn’t matter? It feels like a paradox
In: 222
If you are put in suspended animation while going on a trip of 5 light years, no matter how long it takes you don’t experience any time personally.
That is not the same exactly as what is going on with life but it is the same idea. Basically, nothing with mass can travel at the speed of light because as you approach the speed of light time slows down more and more and it takes more and more energy to accelerate. But any particle traveling at the speed of light is massless and not affected by this. Time still slows down for them though, and in fact slows down so much that it ceases to move altogether.
From the perspective of the photon, to the extent that 1 can imagine such a thing, the universe is a static picture and the photon is a line that exists in it.
Latest Answers