[Quick-ish Facts] Light Doesn't Experience Time

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Here's one to try to wrap your mind around; Photons do not experience time.

I've had that first sentence written down for days now, and just been unable to expand upon it further really. Reading more and more about physics for a layman like myself can leave you feeling a bit numb in the brain. Those five words require so much explanation, that I don't think I can do it, but let's give it a shot anyway.

What is a Photon?

A photon is a type of elementary particle, specifically a boson class particle, that is constantly travelling at the speed of light in a vacuum and has zero rest mass. These two points are important, but basically we don't fully understand photons yet. Our current best explanation comes from Quantum Mechanics, which I am not getting into here. Please, please correct me someone, but if binge watching PBS documentaries has taught me anything, it's that light is kinda both a particle and a wave. To my knowledge, this is best demonstrated with the double-slit experiment which shows that light and matter can display characteristics of both classically defined waves and particles, as well as some more stuff to do with quantum mechanics.

What is Time?

This is well out of my league, I've seen physics experts crumble with this question. All we need to know for this is we experience time, photons don't. Moving on now.

It's all relative anyway...

Thanks to the great Albert Einstein, we have the Theory of Relativity, which first helped us to understand the relationship between time and distance. In a nutshell, if we want to get to a distant point in space, and we constantly increase our speed, approaching the speed of light our clocks will slow down relative to someone watching us back on Earth. For us though, we'd reach our destination far quicker than we'd have expected. There's a bunch of extra considerations, for example the faster you go the higher your mass is and we'd also need an awful lot of energy, but let's not worry about that for now.

Mass cannot travel through our universe at the speed of light, it's physically impossible with classical physics, however light... it's got no mass, and because of this it does travel at, well the speed of light and "experiences" no distance and no time. Isn't physics fun?

Anyone with an actual background in Physics will no doubt find the post laughable, however for us everyday folk, it's just a fun bit of science. Trying to wrap your mind around concepts such as time, light and how this big ol' universe works isn't easy. For example, the guy who first devised M-Theory, Edward Witton, openly admits he doesn't fully understand his own theory, and this is arguably one of the smartest fellas on the planet.

What did you think? Let me know your thoughts in the comments down below, and as always make sure to follow me for the latest Cryptocurrency, Internet and Pop Culture updates. Until next time, Peace!

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Sources:
Does light experience time? (https://phys.org/news/2014-05-does-light-experience-time.html)
Image by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA/Sonoma State University/Aurore Simonnet (https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=56502849)

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