Expand your mind Monday
Cinorjer
Veteran
OK, if you know anything about physics, you know light is made of photons, and photons are created already traveling at the speed of light, which is the fastest anything can travel in the reality we call the universe. You might also know the theory of relativity, which is that the faster you move, the slower time moves for you relative to what's around you. If you are traveling at a significant fraction of the speed of light in a space ship, a journey that took you minutes will have taken years to someone watching you whiz by. Got that?
OK, here's where you need to expand your mind. What if you could travel at the speed of light? Yes, that's impossible. But what if you could become a photon? What would the universe look like to you? We have pictures from the Hubble telescope that show galaxies billions of light years away. It took, from our perspective, billions of years for that photon to travel that huge distance and hit our camera lens to be absorbed.
The space time equation for a photon equals zero. From the photon's perspective, it is born and dies at the same time. To a photon, it takes the exact same amount of time to travel an inch or a million miles, and that is no time at all. It's impossible to slow down a photon. When we say light travels slower in glass, we mean it bounces around and the path is bent so it has a longer distance to travel from our perspective. The photon is going as fast as it always does, at the speed of light.
So all photons are created and ended at the exact same time by their relative perspective, meaning in some basic way they don't exist. Their existence is an illusion created by the laws of the universe. Does that blow your mind?
Comments
Statements A and B look contradictory, could you explain? If a photon is travelling at the speed of light, wouldn't it take longer to travel a bigger distance?
I've heard about this notion about light before. It didn't make the same conclusion though, you're new one is really interesting in comparison.
The way I heard it was that a photon experiences no time and since it doesn't experience time it wouldn't be able to experience space either, so no space and no time. The conclusion is rather different though, not that light's existence is an illusion but that it doesn't exist in time and space but only in the ever present now.
The comparison of the two conclusions brings to mind the two truths doctrine. Light's conventional existence is illusory but that doesn't make it non existent either.
What expanded my mind was going out with the local astronomy club and being shown the Andromeda galaxy, which was like this little smudge in the telescope viewfinder. For the first time I had a real sense of the mind-boggling distances involved, the awesome size of the cosmos.
Really interesting, thanks for expanding my understanding of photons!
@SpinyNorman you might like this...
Yes.
Light, that is photons, take 8 minutes to get to us from the sun. From the nearest star, several years (4.2). The speed of light photons is 186 000 miles per second. So @Cinorjer mind blowing is incorrect.
With Quantum tunnelling light particles arrive before they have left, which really is mind blowing.
What I always found interesting is that a photon will hit us at the same speed whether we are travelling away from it, towards it or standing still.
Hubble telescope images here: http://hubblesite.org/gallery/wallpaper/pr2010013a/
Live feed from International Space Station: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/iss-hdev-payload
If you see a black screen it will be because ISS is on the dark side of the earth and probably over the ocean, but do try again later. And give it time to load. Click on the "ISS Tracker" tab underneath the screen to see where the Space Station currently is.
In the meantime here is a recording from earlier: http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/90880737
It's that strange thing called relativity. To us, a photon has a measured speed. So many miles in a second. But to a photon, the timerate it experiences has slowed until it is zero. So a photon cannot experience time. If you were a proton, which travels fast but not quite the speed of light, the time it takes to cross the galaxy would be a few seconds if you were the proton. But in that few seconds, our sun would have been born and died as a red giant, perhaps.
Think from the photon's perspective, not ours. The 186 k miles per second is what we observe from our relative speed. If you were riding the photon, the faster you go, the slower you experience time compared to the rest of reality. Of course if you have any mass at all, you can't go the speed of light. It's a strange thing to force yourself to imagine.
Both is correct, actually. If you cannot experience time, then you cannot experience anything including space. Experience itself is a function of time and space. Well done.
Here is further mind boggling ... ten dimensional space ...
I think I need to lie down again.....
Another video about relativity.
Did Usain Bolt really run 100m in 9.63 seconds?
"There was a young lady name Bright
who could travel much faster than light
She set out one day in a relative way
and came back the previous night!"
That's about all I can add to the discussion
As @Cinorjer said its all about relativity and seeing things from the perspective of the photon.
In relativity space and time aren't two separate things but one thing they cleverly call space-time. The faster you move through space the slower you move through time, so the closer you get to the speed of light the slower time passes for you until it stops altogether at the speed of light.
That's the wild thing about the universe, its ability to blow our minds, isn't it? Of course only objects with no mass can achieve the speed of light, and that would by definition mean you had to transform into a photon and photons don't "experience" anything. But our imagination can.
Now, here's the final mind expansion. What else besides photons exists but has no mass? How about our conscious thoughts. Of course my mind exists. I'm using it to type to you. My brain has mass, and my brain creates my mind, but how much mass does a thought have? Stephen Hawking talks about how by his calculations the only thing that can escape a black hole is information. No matter how hard I try, I can't get my mind to expand that far.
LOL
Here is why we may need a 'rainbow body' ...
http://opcoa.st/PGHp8
More details on my tmxxine site, which probably needs updating last Monday ...
http://opcoa.st/PGHR9
Our motto is, 'It's impssible, let's do it.’
A photon stopped at the bar and asked if there was a room to rent.
The bartender said "Sure thing. Can I take your bag up to your room?"
The photon said "No, I am travelling light."
ba-dum tchhhh!
Zeno of Elea put it (approximately) this way:
Achilles races a tortoise but the tortoise has a head start. When Achilles begins to run, the tortoise is at a point down the road. When Achilles gets to that point the tortoise has moved a short distance to a new point. When Achilles gets to that point, again the tortoise has moved. Even though the tortoise is slow, as long as its speed is not zero it will always have moved at least a short distance during the time it takes Achilles to get to the next point. Therefore, even though Achilles is faster than the tortoise, he can never pass it, or even quite catch it.
I never got that. If Achilles is moving faster than the tortoise then won't he overtake it?
Sometimes math problems don't make sense in practice.
A rabbit is 2 feet away from its hole. Every jump it takes lands it half the distance needed to get to the hole. According to the math, the rabbit will never make it to the hole.
I would certainly have thought so.... I came to that conclusion... Usain Bolt may argue against it too...
To me, Zeno's mind games were always a good way of illustrating the need to pick the right tools to solve a problem. You can't use simple division (dividing a length into two parts) to solve a problem when you need to factor in time and speed. For that, you have to invent algebra. Likewise, Galileo had to use an esoteric math called calculus to solve the problem of acceleration for celestial bodies in orbit. Algebra couldn't handle it. According to algebra, all the planets should fly off into space.
Algebra and Calculus (Algie and Coco for short)... my ex-neighbour's two Cairn Terriers. He was a Maths lecturer, you may not be surprised to learn....
I was always better at applied maths than pure maths, and used to work as an information analyst for the ambulance service, doing research and audit.
It's true what they say, lies, damned lies and statistics. I used to do trend analysis, which is definitely one of the dark arts. It comes down to asking how many lives might a particular treatment save over a number of years, and how much will it cost? It is all about the money.
I feel honoured to have worked with paramedics and ambulance technicians, they are the real heroes.
If you live in the UK then you should be worried about the numbers, the NHS is approaching meltdown. It needs much more money than the politicians are prepared to allocate, though ironically the public would be happy to cough up. Strange!
Cinorjer,
This paradox is right up your alley, and quite related to your original post!
David,
Similar paradox but this one includes a time element. Therefore it is a demonstration of more than just an asymptote.
An infinite number of mathematicians walk into a bar. The first orders a beer, the second orders half a beer, the third orders a quarter of a beer, and so on. … After the seventh order, the bartender pours two beers and says, “You fellas ought to know your limits."
(@Honden, You may need to change your picture. I can't see it, just the small 'photo' icon. Don't know about anyone else tho'....)
Since light travels in waves, a photon is what would be moving with that wave. It's difficult to prove the existence of something invisible, but we can conduct experiments that will show some good examples of their existence. Water vapors is a good example. It's invisible but we know it exists cause we can feel it when its humid, and we can collect it to get water.
If it is proven somehow that photons don't exist, then it would mean that light doesn't travel, and that it can only been seen at a given space and time.
I recall that weird double-slit experiment where they were firing single photons but still getting wave-like behaviour. Strange! And then we have the EM spectrum, which is described by differences in wavelength.
What I still find most boggling is the fact that light from the most distance galaxies takes 13.7 billion years to reach us, and that is just the known universe.
Hm. But what we have proven is that light is both a wave and particle, depending on the experiment we run. So by that viewpoint light exists in two different forms at the same time, or perhaps in neither form until it interacts with the universe. The solar system is flooded with photons by the sun, yet space itself is empty blackness even though it's filled with photons. Even your body is firing off photons in the infrared spectrum constantly. The photon exists for an infinitely short time only from its own perspective at the beginning and end of its life, but from our relative perspective it might be billions of years old. Add that to the fact that the observed speed of light is the same no matter how fast or slow you're traveling, I suppose that leap of imagination is what made Einstein such a genius. And we think "form is emptiness" is a hard thing to wrap our minds around?
The wave/particle duality is a fundamental notion in physics, but has no easy translation outside that field. But the space/time continuum fits more agreeably with wave thinking; I think this is the primary cause of the cognitive dissonance we experience when we try to use the particle context and the "acceleration" of time.
Well its now Thursday so maybe since it's later in the week just a little light sorbet to cleanse your mind is more in order.
https://www.thrillist.com/eat/nation/the-first-ice-cream-was-made-with-whale-poop
^^. Yum
But was it done on porpoise?
And did it make anyone get eel with salmon-ella?