Does Light Experience Time?

[alan2here]

That's pretty much it. Let's say you were to somehow travel unaccelerated, along with the peak of a lightwave. From source to destination no time will have elapsed.

Is this the same light wave that took a few mins to get from the sun to the earth?

 

Edit: I see. Photon experienced the journey instantly we on earth saw it took some time.

 

Relativity full of 0's and Infinities with the fundamental faster than anything else "light". Yet light has a finite measurable non-fundamental in any obvious way speed?

Edited October 5, 2008 by alan2here

[Norman Albers]

A "photon's frame" of reference is a trick question. I encountered this in my assumption of a localized wave packet with which I could "ride along" . Realizing I am a massive observer and really cannot, I felt it might be fair to describe an unchanging farfield wave-packet dependent upon vacuum field response. I 'simply' substituted [math] X=x-ct [/math] for the propagation dimension and 'did away with time'. This is unsettling at first to be sure, though it seems to be mathematically clean if you cop to what you are doing. The whole thing is larger than this understanding and I am struggling to see implications. We seem to conclude that spacetime is a "medium" of spacelike vibratory characteristics, which are variously excited. More when I get to spread out my papers on the desk in the house I just moved into...........

[Tsadi]

Oh well, more and more physicists are coming to the conclusion that time really doesn't exist at all, and really without us there, there is no flow of time, and everything is more like discontinuous fleeting flashes of existence.

 

So it kinda works well with what you said.

 

In fact, i do believe Stewart Hameroff has said time isn't actually a river, and even Frank J Tipler had developed a theory where existence itself flashed in and out of existence at Planck Time.

 

I can understand if existence was going to pop in and out of existence at Planck Time, it would be that time acting as a zero point.

[swansont]

Oh well, more and more physicists are coming to the conclusion that time really doesn't exist at all, and really without us there, there is no flow of time, and everything is more like discontinuous fleeting flashes of existence.

 

I'd like to know who they are. I don't think any spoke at the conference I just attended.

[petebro]

If a photon is at rest then it would appear that no time exists ie inertial time reference , but because photons are being emmitted from the sun and other sources of energy quanta ,the photon are moving in a light wave then the photon experiences time because of motion ,acceleration moreover the photon moves as a result of electromagnetic forces ,the time reference of

the past ,if the universe was full of photons then the photon appears motionless so time appears not to exist ,but the universe isnt, full of photons,

but the photons are the transport of light in a particle electromagnetic wave .

the fluid of sound . packets of photons light quanta are being attracted by electromagnetic fields backing up in the planetary fields , again time reference

washing machine when viewed from the front the centre being the light

source the quanta are finely packed together and transported around by

what we understand in general relativety so the photon emmisions are travelling in a vaccum but the enertial time reference would appear that they

are motionless and have filled space but are experiencing time its a case of catching up with initial emmisions overtaking it and watching the photons pass

by so photons are experiencing time but out of our intial time reference .

In a paradoxical fashion time being created appears not to exist because of the photons but a photon experiences time but not in our inertial time reference ,catch up with the past as alber said .Its time jim but not as we know it

[Norman Albers]

Smoke more sativa.

[pioneer]

Light exists in two references. According to relativity, at C we would get maximum time dilation or we should only see frequency equal to O from stationary reference. What we see with energy is frequency able to be less than zero. This is a paradox.

 

Picture you were traveling at C, what would something with a frequency at 10-8 seconds, in stationary reference, look like in your C reference? The clock in stationary references is moving faster implying this frequency would even look faster. That would mean visible light may look like gamma, for example, which would violate the conservation of energy. To maintain conservation of energy that frequency needs to remain the same or be independent of the C reference, since light is not generating either GR or SR in sufficient amounts for a physical change.

 

Light has one leg at C and another in finite reference. One reference of light is outside of time and the other defines it, since energy carries finite clocks built into its energy value. If we had no change of energy, increasing or decreasing, in the universe, time would stop. Time is mediated by the second reference of energy which can be tuned to any change of state in matter. Without this second reference and only C reference there is only one increment of time which is zero. Normally we just say energy does this but ignore the paradox of relativity.

[iNow]

I really don't understand why your rubbish is still allowed on these boards, Pioneer. You use a lot of the right words, but you put them together like word salad and don't support your assertions, instead treating them as unequivocal and true. It's really f-ing annoying. You'd be better on a philosophy board than a science one.

[SuperCollide]

This is an worthwhile article if you want to check it out. interesting thread.

 

http://www.supercollide.com/2008/10/stubbornly-persistent-illusion.html

 

The truth of physics is at odds with our meager perceptions of the world. Our notion of time - seconds always receding - is not reality. As Albert Einstein famously remarked on the death of a friend:

 

Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

[iNow]

I'm not sure his poetic quote jives very well with the second law of thermodynamics.

[Norman Albers]

I completed a wave packet analysis of an assumed EM Gaussian disturbance. I allowed myself the mathematic privilege of "riding along with the packet". This is not a real option, at least for massive entities. However, this is analysis. In this frame of reference, one can understand the need for waves going both ways in terms of k-space, but what does this say about the transform back to our experience? I have rewritten things in terms of a co-moving [math] X=x-ct[/math] and there are no time-dependent terms in such a choice. One gets +/- contributions in k-space. Stay tuned.

[redsaint63]

light has mass!!! so time is needed for the particles to form so the answer to your question is light does experience time the smallest measureable amount of time billionths of nanoseconds. this is all theory kids!!!!!

[iNow]

light has mass!!!

 

Actually, no. It doesn't. I'd welcome a few peer reviewed sources which suggest otherwise.

[Norman Albers]

Light photons have total energy which has mass equivalent, but mass is usefully defined as those energy states which more or less "hang out", not boogeying at 'c'.