Light and time

I thought this was an interesting concept to have to get your head around, and add that if in reality if light does not experience time, then it cannot experience distance.If it cant experience distance and time, then it has no speed. So is the distance experienced by us with regards to a photon, in this supposed three dimensional reality, an internal mental illusion, neccesary to experience coherent thought?. Because if the photon doesn't experience time, then all wave forms travelling at light speed, cant experience it either.Which rather tends to leave the notion of a hard reality in limbo.
www.universetoday.com...

a reply to: anonentity

Which rather tends to leave the notion of a hard reality in limbo.

No. It leaves time being relative to the frame of reference of the observer. And the speed of light being relative to everything at once, or nothing at all. Take your pick.

Why doesn't like experience time?

I am not snapping or anything or arguing

It's just as we know, most photons we receive in our eye from viewing space are historic. Those waves, although traveling at the speed of light, had to travel (Right) and experience the time it took to travel?

a reply to: brace22

Relativity says that, at the speed of light, time does not happen.

Doesn't really affect us though. Not so you'd notice.

a reply to: Phage

So what about the time the photons take to travel? Isn't that time?

I'm sorry. I've only recently began to learn and understand relativity and all of this.

a reply to: brace22

So what about the time the photons take to travel? Isn't that time?

For us, yes. For the photon, no.

I've only recently began to learn and understand relativity and all of this.

Bold claim.
Kidding, sort of.

a reply to: Phage


Im pretty sure it was regular? I don't remember pressing the bold text button?

Ha.

No I get it, I probably should have put a disclaimer stating how I have not yet reached understanding.

Cant you say that as your speed increases up to the speed of light, the time in the observed Universe speeds up. If you went faster than the speed of light, time in the observed Universe would start to go backwards, so would it be fair to say that light speed, or light itself is actually hanging in time neither going forward or going backward in time , so when a photon collapses into something, how can it actually hit something,if its outside of our time, where to it, distance and speed dont actually exist in our frame of reference?.

Photons live in a flat, go-splat world. As Phage correctly points out, they do not experience time. From their perspective (which of course they don't really have, seeing as how they are not sentient), everything happens instantaneously.

Yes, it is interesting to think about. No, it doesn't really call reality into question (at least not as defined by physicists), but relativity does tend to blow many a mind.

What I wonder about is that seeing as how light has a set speed 299,792,458 meters/second and no matter how fast you travel it is constantly leaving you at this speed, what if you are traveling at say 100 meters /second and are passing someone who is standing still, does that same beam of light thats leaving you at 299,792,458 meters/second will still head away from the person whos standing still at this constant same speed? Yes. Im guessing that is where time dilation comes into play. So that light can maintain its constant speed, time slows down within an area, kinda like a gravity well, surrounding the person who is traveling. Which seems to me that you can say the same for any bubble of space as you pan its center point from one area to another at any given speed, to make up for the speed at which light would have to travel away from the center point to keep up with the speed of movement of the hypothetical bubble in space, time essentially has to slow down. It makes me think that maybe time is an illusion and all their really is, rather than time, is light. Maybe time is an illusion, or perhaps the speed of light is like the quartz of a computer processor constantly ticking away like a metronome and maybe the reason time slows in the presence of a gravity well is due to the large volume of data and the computer than runs this simulation is bogging down from data overload. Of course maybe Im crazy too. Yea, prolly crazy.

originally posted by: ScrappyJ
What I wonder about is that seeing as how light has a set speed 299,792,458 meters/second and no matter how fast you travel it is constantly leaving you at this speed, what if you are traveling at say 100 meters /second and are passing someone who is standing still, does that same beam of light thats leaving you at 299,792,458 meters/second will still head away from the person whos standing still at this constant same speed? Yes. Im guessing that is where time dilation comes into play. So that light can maintain its constant speed, time slows down within an area, kinda like a gravity well, surrounding the person who is traveling. Which seems to me that you can say the same for any bubble of space as you pan its center point from one area to another at any given speed, to make up for the speed at which light would have to travel away from the center point to keep up with the speed of movement of the hypothetical bubble in space, time essentially has to slow down.

Semantic nitpicks aside, what you're saying here captures the gist of it. Time and Space expand/contract relative to each intertial frame of reference, but the speed of light is fixed.

Maybe time is an illusion, or perhaps the speed of light is like the quartz of a computer processor constantly ticking away like a metronome and maybe the reason time slows in the presence of a gravity well is due to the large volume of data and the computer than runs this simulation is bogging down from data overload. Of course maybe Im crazy too. Yea, prolly crazy.

Here we're crossing from the realm of science into philosophy. I have personally wondered if the speed of light was a hard limit placed upon our "simulated universe," to limit how much information the master CPU has to process simultaneously.

Similarly, I've wondered if black holes are the simulation's way of creating a new holographic boundary whenever the amount of information in a given sector exceeds what can be mapped to the present boundary. Basically, a way of saying "the information in this region is too dense so we need to re-index it."

And then of course there is the fascinating double-slit experiment in its myriad forms, which one could interpret to imply that elementary particles are not rendered until observed (assuming a simulated universe). When a conscious observer measures the photon, he is in effect sending a "query" across process boundaries to a remote server somwhere, and the query is returning a single particle.


A lot of the universe's strangeness can be explained as quirks of the simulation. Unfortunately, it's all unfalsifiable. It does make for some fascinating science fiction though.

a reply to: Greggers



Isn't the most likely explanation for the state of the Universe, is that in all probability, we have already been sucked into a Black hole, and what we consider reality, is spent in a two dimensional state in the safe time locked state on the event horizon ,where time is just like the photon. Quantum wise no information would be lost, and for life to flourish, it would have to have to be somewhere less violent than the Cosmos.

originally posted by: anonentity
a reply to: Greggers



Isn't the most likely explanation for the state of the Universe, is that in all probability, we have already been sucked into a Black hole, and what we consider reality, is spent in a two dimensional state in the safe time locked state on the event horizon ,where time is just like the photon. Quantum wise no information would be lost, and for life to flourish, it would have to have to be somewhere less violent than the Cosmos.

I don't think I'd say it's the most likely explanation. The only evidence we have to go on in this regard would be Leonard Susskind's work on black hole entropy and the ensuing holographic principle, but unfortunately that too is unfalsifiable. It's a neat idea. I give you that.

a reply to: Greggers


Well its worth mentioning, because if that was the case, our Universe would be more like an infinite memory, getting infinite information, but the reality,would actually be that of a really good lucid dream, where all things can happen, but the existence would have the same dimensions as a dream has. Is their time and distance in a Dream? sure seems their is, but it cant be....if you get the drift.