Theories and the Answer to Everything

[GazOC]

But, for the photon that makes the journey, from ITS perspective, no time elapses AT ALL.

I'd never looked at it that way!!!!

[Astroman]

Not being able to travel faster than light is not as bad as people think. Because of Lorentz contraction, we can make the traveller-perceived journey-time as short as you like, given sufficiently powerful engines.

The reason we can't travel faster than light is that light already takes ZERO time to go anywhere and you can't beat that!

I know it appears to US that light is taking a non-zero finite time to get, say, from the Sun to here.

But, for the photon that makes the journey, from ITS perspective, no time elapses AT ALL.

Yes, I know it's crazy.

I think this is not a useful argument, as anything with mass is prohibited from achieving c, and as photons do not have mass, the "time" traveled would be undefined, rather than zero. Remember, time elapsed is dependant on the reference frame of the observer, and as photons travel at c, their reference frame is distorted to any observer, anywhere.

This being the case, you could say the photon's unit of time would be the definition of time.

[themos]

I think this is not a useful argument, as anything with mass is prohibited from achieving c

agreed

, and as photons do not have mass, the "time" traveled would be undefined, rather than zero.

Disagree. There is a perfectly good definition of the integral of proper time along any spacetime path. That integral is zero for light-like paths. The same definition gives arbitrarily small values for paths close to light-like, such as very fast masses might achieve.

Remember, time elapsed is dependant on the reference frame of the observer, and as photons travel at c, their reference frame is distorted to any observer, anywhere. This being the case, you could say the photon's unit of time would be the definition of time.

I am not sure what a distorted reference frame is. The reference frame of an observer is the frame in which he is stationary, so the time elapsed for an observer is dependent on the observer's trajectory and it is calculated with the path integral I mentioned earlier. What IS the photon's "unit of time"?

[Kaptain Klevtsov]

So if you take the photon as the reference point, does that make everything else travel at the speed of light as the photon is not static?

I'm half serious here, as if you disregard relativity, you might "appear" to be travelling faster than light. Appearing to do so would count, in my book.

Kaptain Klevtsov

[themos]

So if you take the photon as the reference point, does that make everything else travel at the speed of light as the photon is not static?

No. If you are the photon that goes between a Solar ion and an Earth molecule, the time it takes for the trip is zero so you could say that the effective speed of the Earth (seen by the photon) is infinite. That would make everything appear to go at an infinite speed. But that's just the photon being crazy, since it can never experience time. Although, I have to say, it's a feature of the space-time path the photon follows and not anything to do with the nature of the photon itself: any massless particle would behave the same way.

[NeutrinoWave]

it's a feature of the space-time path the photon follows

Yes the Riemann Curvature tensor defines the curvature of the space time

In SR, this curvature would be zero and hence a Minkowski Flat Spacetime.

Gravitation induces a non zero term in the Riemann Curvature tensor, and thus the photon would follow a curved path in space time.

Eddington did a famous expedition to verify this GR prediction of Einstein by observing the solar eclipse and deflection of light by changing positions of stars in the vicinity of the line of sight of the sun