Why does light even move? what force makes it move at insane speed?
In: 193
It doesn’t really move. It does not exist on the time axis in spacetime so technically it has no speed. We perceive it that way, sorta, because causality itself does have speed. (That is actually what “c” stands for, as in speed c, referred to as the speed of light) But from light’s perspective it doesn’t move. It just arrives wherever it is aimed at the instant it is created. The universe is flat to light, doesn’t matter where it is pointed at, it will be there immediately from its perspective.
Think about it this way, you can’t actually watch light go anywhere. You can’t look at a photon and be like “woah look at that thing go”. You can only receive photons by intercepting their “path”. You can capture them but you cannot observe them, because technically they don’t exist on the way to wherever they are going. They exist only at the exact instant that they “arrive”. Once you detect a photon that means it no longer exists, it arrived. The only way to detect it is by getting hit by it. You can’t look at a light photon from the side and watch it whizz by, it’s not actually traveling through spacetime the way we intuit.
In fact, no matter *your* speed, light will always hit you at the speed of light. It’s weird like that because, again, it doesn’t have a speed in the traditional sense to begin with. Time slows down the faster you go due to time dilation. There is no time at speed c. And speed is a function of time and space, you cannot have a speed without time, which light does not have. When something has no speed it experiences maximum time. When it has no time it experiences maximum speed. Which in this case is like serious ultra maximum to the max because the speed is catching up with causality itself at that point, which is why it effectively doesn’t even have a speed anymore. It teleports. It would arrive to you the same moment the information of its existence arrives to you.
When you get to the bottom of things with general relativity and quantum physics, stuff just get real weird. Our brains are made to make sense of our immediate surroundings so that we can survive. Everything else is basically incompatible, we’re not built to compute this kind of stuff and there’s no way to develop an intuition for this natural because it doesn’t affect us in a way we can do anything with biologically speaking.
Tl;Dr – light doesn’t move at all.
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