4 ms·
Always casually wonder that as you approach the speed of light, Lorentz contraction shrinks distance in the direction of travel, and slows time. Photons travell
by jodrellblank 6y ago
Always casually wonder that as you approach the speed of light, Lorentz contraction shrinks distance in the direction of travel, and slows time. Photons travelling at the speed of light experience no time in the direction of travel. Therefore they experience no distance in the direction of travel.
In some frame of reference, a photon leaving the Sun and hitting your retina, is a 0-distance, instantaneous connection between the Sun and your retina. And in another frame of reference, the photon "should" be stretched a hundred million miles long - or, not be a discrete corpuscular thing with a front and a back which travels through the intervening space.
It would be simpler to imagine if there was a nice Aether already connecting the Sun and your eye, for the photon to be a peturbation of, and then the emission of a photon wouldn't be a generation of a new thing de novo, but an electron dropping down an orbital level and its electric charge yanking on the electromagnetic field Aether like shoving a compression wave down a slinky. :/
- jaybrendansmith 6y agoIt's nice to think there must be a missing field that brings it all together, knitting space-time into a consistent quantum reality with causality preserved, and neatly explaining things like quantum vacuum energy, superposition, dark matter, and wave-particle duality. For some reason the idea of photons stretching a hundred million miles long reminded me of the Asimov story 'The Dead Past' showing how a 'time viewer' would in reality be a Total Informational Awareness device.
- drran 6y ago> It's nice to think there must be a missing field that brings it all together Higgs field? https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_field https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_field Quantum vacuum energy is just noise. Superposition is for waves only. Dark matter can be explained by "SISO" principle. Wave-paticle duality is boring simple: https://dotwave.org/single-particle-creates-interference-after-double-slit/ https://dotwave.org/single-particle-creates-interference-aft...