Here's one to try to wrap your mind around; Photons do not experience time.
I've had that first sentence written down for days now, and just been unable to expand upon it further really. Reading more and more about physics for a layman like myself can leave you feeling a bit numb in the brain. Those five words require so much explanation, that I don't think I can do it, but let's give it a shot anyway.
What is a Photon?
A photon is a type of elementary particle, specifically a boson class particle, that is constantly travelling at the speed of light in a vacuum and has zero rest mass. These two points are important, but basically we don't fully understand photons yet. Our current best explanation comes from Quantum Mechanics, which I am not getting into here. Please, please correct me someone, but if binge watching PBS documentaries has taught me anything, it's that light is kinda both a particle and a wave. To my knowledge, this is best demonstrated with the double-slit experiment which shows that light and matter can display characteristics of both classically defined waves and particles, as well as some more stuff to do with quantum mechanics.
What is Time?
This is well out of my league, I've seen physics experts crumble with this question. All we need to know for this is we experience time, photons don't. Moving on now.
It's all relative anyway...
Thanks to the great Albert Einstein, we have the Theory of Relativity, which first helped us to understand the relationship between time and distance. In a nutshell, if we want to get to a distant point in space, and we constantly increase our speed, approaching the speed of light our clocks will slow down relative to someone watching us back on Earth. For us though, we'd reach our destination far quicker than we'd have expected. There's a bunch of extra considerations, for example the faster you go the higher your mass is and we'd also need an awful lot of energy, but let's not worry about that for now.
Mass cannot travel through our universe at the speed of light, it's physically impossible with classical physics, however light... it's got no mass, and because of this it does travel at, well the speed of light and "experiences" no distance and no time. Isn't physics fun?
Anyone with an actual background in Physics will no doubt find the post laughable, however for us everyday folk, it's just a fun bit of science. Trying to wrap your mind around concepts such as time, light and how this big ol' universe works isn't easy. For example, the guy who first devised M-Theory, Edward Witton, openly admits he doesn't fully understand his own theory, and this is arguably one of the smartest fellas on the planet.
What did you think? Let me know your thoughts in the comments down below, and as always make sure to follow me for the latest Cryptocurrency, Internet and Pop Culture updates. Until next time, Peace!
Sources:
Does light experience time? (https://phys.org/news/2014-05-does-light-experience-time.html)
Image by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA/Sonoma State University/Aurore Simonnet (https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=56502849)
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Hi John, I've just read your post and I find it very interesting.
It reminded me of video that I found some time ago in YT, so I went back to find it and got lucky. I made a transcription for those that don't have time to watch a video.
https://steemit.com/science/@qrwizard/what-the-heck-is-a-photon
Thank you!
Steemit is being very buggy right now, and I can't get the link to work so I'll try again in the morning.
I find all of this so fascinating, although I don't pretend to fully understand it all. I can lose vast amounts of time on wikipedia going from post-to-post.
Thanks for your comment, it really means a lot!
Thanks for your reply. The link is up. I hope you like the article.
Cheers
Thank you so much for that! That is actually a really good explanation of what a photon is, at least to a layman like myself. For me anyway, my brain tries to think of a photon as a particle, but thinking about it as a "unit" of light is probably a bit easier.
I'm like you in the sense that I'd prefer to read something than watch a video. Thanks for transcribing that pal, really clears things up for me!
If the speed of light is indeed 299 792 458 meters/second and you could travel at 299 792 457 m/s would you observe the light leaving a flashlight in your hand moving away from you at 1 m/s?
I haven't looked this up, but I think the answer is no because the speed of light is a cosmological constant. It will always be C. I think
I would think you are correct as time slows down as we approach the speed of light
I love watching those documentaries too but admittedly have a very limited understanding. I'm in love with the theories and ideas about how things work and the possibilities of other dimensions, how to navigate space, time and light. It's all too much but still some of us are pulled towards the quest for understanding.
There that comment was a little better than my first knee jerk quip which was "hello from the U.S. sooooo how is the future looking today?" Sorry, it's a bad cliche joke from an ugly 'merican. ;)
There's two in particular that I've seen over and over, Fabric of the Cosmos and The Elegant Universe, both by Dr Brian Greene (I think I've butchered his name). I think things are slowly starting to sink in for me, very slowly, but the actual mathematics behind it still just looks like a scary wall of characters to me.
It's all just so fascinating! When you see our place in the universe, some of the silly worries kinda disappear I find.
haha, I've often been tempted to say the same thing to people to the east of us! Australian's man, they're so far ahead of us!
Sorry about my ADD comments. They say green is supposed to help with that but nope! Happy 420 day btw :)
haha mate, you have nothing to be sorry about! Honestly, I hit the bong a bit too hard myself yesterday and typing seemed too much like effort...
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