Photons have no time

[ldsoftwaresteve]

I hear 'time dilation', 'gravity well', and I think IHOP, "if it weren't for my horse", and sharpened pencils going into my ear.

[Millard Alexander Dorsey]

Okay, that's confusing. Wouldn't that mean that all photons share a reference frame at all times?

 

Wait NO - because they don't always travel at c do they? Does a photon have mass when it passes through water or air or whatever? Does it experience time then?

 

Also, if you have an area of negative pressure (Casimir Vacuum) and you sent a photon throught it, theoretically it would travel faster the c - then it would it be going backward in time, and arrive before it left?

 

Wacky stuff - and I'm just as confused as you.

 

On the other hand, it does sort of address my question about what reference frame quantum entanglement would occur in.

 

Interesting though - it almost leads to a redefinition of simultaneous. I have a photon, emitted from star A 10 years ago, and a photon emitted from star B 5 years ago - when I find them, I trap them. Which photon travelled longer? Neither - they where both trapped at the same time. If I release a photon from my "photon gun" toward Alpha Centauri and another toward the Mars, fifty minutes later, my counterpart on Mars can see my photon. Four years later Alpha Centauri catches my photon. Which photon was capture first? According the photon, they were both captured at the same time. Intuitively (ie, wrongly) every event that has ever happened to any photon not travelling through a gravity distorted frame or medium thicker than vacuum occured at the exact same instant throughtout the history of the universe.

 

Is time itself (the difference in this instant) the effect of mass and particles on the movement of photons?

 

Someone stop me before I make a complete *** of myself.

 

TFS

[too late, isn't it?]

 

Never mind - the gravity question is moot - it isn't curving because it's slowing down, it's curving because the definition of "straight line" has been changed. Hold for things like water though. Unless I misunderstand photon passage through water (quite likely.)

Modern science was changed when we blew up part of Japan with interacting photons. Time-space has to include mass if it moves from point A to point B, in the same environment such as your brain, a thought may travel a distance of infinite miles yet the very essens of a thought has to weigh, I said weigh a photon. The UNIVERSE is your mind and the space-time relationship of moving mass are the thoughts that you generate or call it thinking! QM at the 4th level is cool reading there are a lot of thoughts on what you say. Don't bog yourself down with what I call the attack theories, go to the higher level instantly (smile), I don't think we are trying to argue e=mc2 , or if an egg head is a real thing.

 

DORSEY

[TheFaithfulStone]

What?

[Qfwfq]

Is the egg head folklore?

[ldsoftwaresteve]

Angstrom:

Not only does light have no time, light also has no space. From light’s point of view, all points in our space-time are directly and instantly connected so there is no locality. Light is the direct exchange of radial energy from one particle (usually an electron) to another. There is no need to package light energy into photons and send them flying through space at the speed of light or any other speed because, for light, there is no space and there is no time.

You mean, you think light isn't affected by time, does not occupy space and all points in the universe are just one point from light's perspective. Of course, I am free to think otherwise.

But neither of us are free from the way it really is.

The only reason you are able to make statements like yours is because a guy named Einstein told us that time dilates and isn't constant and that gravity is a warping of space-time.

But what, pray tell, if he was wrong? What if there's another way to explain the curvature of the path of light as it passes a star? What if Einstein was looking at a phenomenon and made the assumption that we live in a fixed frame of reference? And what if we don't?

[cwes99_03]

Or is it simply that light only exists in 3-dimensions (according to it's own self)?

 

There has to be some separation of space and time. Light or more specifically the photon is the relation between them.

[Tormod]

Modern science was changed when we blew up part of Japan with interacting photons.

 

You did what?

[Tormod]

A lot of people in this thread seem confused by some very fundamental principles. Lighten up, guys.

 

I highly recommend reading Richard Feynman's "Six Easy Pieces" and "Six Not-So-Easy Pieces", both of which discusses some very interesting approaches to relativity - with a huge sense of humor, too.

[Millard Alexander Dorsey]

Ok so negative pressure was explained well enough. Photons do not travel at speeds other than c. Refraction of light causes light to be absorbed and re-emitted in the medium it is traveling through, and thus due to absorption and re-emision times the light is perceived by us to travel at v<c.

The actual thought that I believe is missing here is that time is not defined for c because there is no inertial reference frame for c (for time to be calculated one must have an inertial reference frame). That being said, it is not that the light has not been traveling from star b for 5 less years than from star a, but that the time traveled cannot be defined by a referential frame of light (because it does not exist.) It therefore must be defined by a frame of reference that does exist.

 

i.e. if you were capable of traveling at the speed of light, time would cease to exist for you. Thus the photon cannot degrade by traveling from point a to point b. It can only degrade (lose power) if it interacts with matter.

 

Thus is the cunundrum for many of us. That is to say that travel at or above light speed is impossible for anything with mass (and something with mass is the only thing that might have the ability to measure time). That is why, to test theories of SR an extremely low mass particle with a predictable time of degradation is observed. It cannot travel at c, but relatively close to it, and time dilation can be more easily calculated for speeds near c (reason, a bigger window of observation).

Now we are starting to communicate what you put forth is very clear. Question! In route from point A to point C a photon in a plasma soup collides with another photon B, as the photon continues is it still the same or has it changed into something different, in theory it was slowed during the collision and is now AB+x =[x = A1 + B1] in route to C. Could that moment be the value of a thought and if so,it would have to occur as a particle not a wave. Isn' it true that similar wave pitch will join and different wave pitches will cancel each other out? Is there a stream of photons or a few random still on the way, or on the way back ,or never left? Your thought may help me answer a couple of questions on this point.

 

DORSEY

[Millard Alexander Dorsey]

Read it here - for that other thread.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster_than_light Of course, they don't say what the calculations ARE...

 

Here it is again. Certaintly speculative, but I didn't just totally pull it out of my rump.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scharnhorst_Effect

 

There is some stuff on arXiv about it, but I don't know what "birefringent" means, so...

 

It does kind of imply an luminferous-ether-kinda-thing doesn't it?

 

What about all these "slow light" experiments I've been reading about? Just changing the defraction of gas to something really high?

 

TFS

Hello Faithfulstone: Plasma soup is a wave that contains particles, one must remember the argument of; is "light or e=mc2" a result of a wave measurement or a partical measurement. The wave argument falls apart so often I don't feel it to be valid. The particle resolution is or would result in absolute random chaos. Low light is that, photons are the smallest practical energents that have atomic mass, and collide in the soup, such that you might add a pinch of salt to a bowl of stirring beans, or sugar to a cup of coffee, the atomic reaction or how quickly the cup would be drinkable would be what ever the atomic value of your lips are , including the pain level of tolerant heat. The whole issue is in space-time, can any atomic mass arrive from point A to point B fater than the equated speed of light, forget where A starts or where B ends, eggies forgot that, so we can't use that. It is not the gas that one would defract, but the angle of collision of the photons in the plasma. Tell me if you got this so far .. help me if you don't.

 

DORSEY

[Robert Angstrom]

are there any crack pots trying to say that there is only one photon in the universe, and because they dont have time the one photon is able to do all the interactions that we see around us.. I think I heard about something similar - but instead it was an electron.. has anyone heard this and knows more about it, I would be interested to find out more :)

The originator of the theory of one electron, one proton, one neutron, etc. was Paul Dirac. Dirac made a great many contributions to quantum physics but this was certainly one of his more speculative concepts.

[ldsoftwaresteve]

Or is it simply that light only exists in 3-dimensions (according to it's own self)?

 

There has to be some separation of space and time. Light or more specifically the photon is the relation between them.

Space is an absence of everything. Time can be measured (but is just an effect of the perception of change). I can't reach out and touch space nor can I do that with time.

McCutcheon provides the first way of actually grappling with this stuff. Also, see the thread started by InfiniteNow about the concept of 'Now'.

McCutcheon's point is that everything that exists is expanding at the same rate. What we see as 'now' is the effect of that expansion. All physical phenomena derive from that expansion. He shows that gravity can be explained as an effect of that expansion and he has developed theory to explain magnetism, electricity and the makeup of light.

And I think that Einstein actually shows that McCutcheon is correct. I think of the drawings of how bodies warp the surrounding space/time and what I see is the effect of assuming a fixed frame of reference. If, however, the frame of reference is expanding (as McCutcheon posits), then I see these drawings in a different light.

If McCutcheon is correct and the expansion is universal, then no matter how fast an object is moving (ala, a photon at 'light speed'), it still continues to expand. Therefore it is subject to that expansion, the same as everything else. And its frame of reference is identical to all other things.

Time is an effect of change, it is not a cause. We always see a direct relationship between our measurement of time and change and assume a causal relationship. But, if McCutcheon is correct, there isn't one.

The motor of the world is this expansion and it drives everything.

[Millard Alexander Dorsey]

hallenrm:hmmm. Isn't that somewhat final?

Actually, in my view, this whole discussion is invalid...at least coming from where I'm at it's invalid.

I follow McCutcheon's theory of all things expanding at a constant rate, even down to the level of the photon. By definition then, the photon having experienced expansion, also is subject to time.

All discussion except McCutcheon's assumes space/time dilation, warping, whatever.

Why light moves at a particular velocity isn't really understood. We pretend we know why but we don't. We also assume, and in my view incorrectly, that the speed of light is the limit of velocity. It just happens to be the velocity that a photon reaches seemingly automatically. But we don't know why ... so I'm doubtful about the certainty of that limit.

COOL

DORSEY

[Millard Alexander Dorsey]

Space is an absence of everything. Time can be measured (but is just an effect of the perception of change). I can't reach out and touch space nor can I do that with time.

McCutcheon provides the first way of actually grappling with this stuff. Also, see the thread started by InfiniteNow about the concept of 'Now'.

McCutcheon's point is that everything that exists is expanding at the same rate. What we see as 'now' is the effect of that expansion. All physical phenomena derive from that expansion. He shows that gravity can be explained as an effect of that expansion and he has developed theory to explain magnetism, electricity and the makeup of light.

And I think that Einstein actually shows that McCutcheon is correct. I think of the drawings of how bodies warp the surrounding space/time and what I see is the effect of assuming a fixed frame of reference. If, however, the frame of reference is expanding (as McCutcheon posits), then I see these drawings in a different light.

If McCutcheon is correct and the expansion is universal, then no matter how fast an object is moving (ala, a photon at 'light speed'), it still continues to expand. Therefore it is subject to that expansion, the same as everything else. And its frame of reference is identical to all other things.

Time is an effect of change, it is not a cause. We always see a direct relationship between our measurement of time and change and assume a causal relationship. But, if McCutcheon is correct, there isn't one.

The motor of the world is this expansion and it drives everything.

I had a chance to die once, during an Asthma attack, being Indian the mustard plaster was not enough (smile) , that's what we used.. ("wrapp in a cloth or better in a guaze, crushed boiled mustard seeds or powder, engulf the chest and front of the neck with the mustard, garlic, onion, and hot sauce if you don't have the peppers; (no this is not a human bueratoe), wait it will turn into a brown brick as hard as a cast), anyway:, in that point of truth, a light which looked more nebula or plasma soup than a sun light, was all over the place .. I was alone .. I did not care about these important communications we all endeavour .. "I know", that it did not matter if I looked south, north, east or west , I was still going to the light without a trail. I love you guys so much , that could only mean I was expanding in all directions at once, as blowing up a ballon .. Yes this therom is true and I was not privy to it , I bet your vippy I will be all over it . THANKS

 

DORSEY

[InfiniteNow]

Hmmm....

 

[steeringThread] So, uh, from a photons own frame of reference, there is no time. [/steeringThread]

 

:evil:

[cwes99_03]

Thanks, Infy. I have a feeling a bunch of people who have no interest in this thread are for some reason trying to hijack it.

 

As to the question posted by one of those people before and after he was talking about non-sense as it would seem.

In route from point A to point C a photon in a plasma soup collides with another photon B, as the photon continues is it still the same or has it changed into something different,

 

Photons do not interact. Waves interact. A photon is simply a way of quantizing the energy of the wave. So in a plasma soup a photon does not collide with another photon, but a wave can interact constructively or destructively with another wave. Does that make things clearer?

[Little Bang]

The statement that anything traveling at the speed of light experiences no time is an accepted conclusion by the majority of the scientific community.

 

If we look at the very first photon to ever come into existence in the universe, and it has some sort of clock that we can look at, that clock will read zero time. If we wait twelve to fifteen billion years ( our best guess as to the age of the universe ) and that photon arrives on earth and we detect it to look at it's clock we see that the clock still reads zero. Not only does that mean it has experienced every event in that time period but also every possible event in that time period and in zero time. It's velocity from it's point of view is infinite.

 

Albert’s equation implies that if we convert matter to pure energy it will be in the form of photons. Let’s say that we have a single proton and we have some magical way of snapping our fingers and the proton flies apart as photons. Now if we look at the tracks of all the photons that came from that proton and knowing that a photon has infinite velocity, how would we know that all those tracks were not made by the very first photon in the universe? In fact why would it not be possible that the first photon, or better yet, the only photon in the universe had created all matter. This may be a stupid post, but I’ll tell one thing, this simplistic view of the universe is one that old Albert would have loved.