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Originally Posted by Mutt
You should post this same post on Stack Exchange Physics Stack Exchange You'll get honest knowledgeable feedback there
I like to read about physics but it's way over my head, I am thrilled when I just get the gist of things like gravitational waves thanks to good science writers who can explain concepts in a way an average person can understand. |
Oh, that's a good suggestion. I'm so used to just posting stuff here on GFY that I wasn't really thinking about putting it on Stack Exchange. I shall do it!
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Originally Posted by **********
Help! I'm lost. If Photons don't experience time, then how can they move? And since we know that light can travel 186,000 miles in 1 second, doesn't that 1 second count as time?
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That's the beauty. For all observers that are not moving at the speed of light, they will agree with you that light will always move ~186,000 miles in one second. But
from the perspective of the photon itself, it will not experience any time passage. If it had a clock, the clock would show no time at all transpires for it from the "time" it's born until the "time" it dies, zero time passes.
One other way to think about it is like this: when we look through a telescope, we see an image that is made up of photons that have travelled the universe. If we look very far away, we can see back in time - like a billion years ago for example - by looking at a system a billion light-years distant. We observe the photons just at they were when they were created. They "believe" they are giving current information to our telescope because no time has passed for them.