Photons don't experience time

Delta4Embassy

Gold Member
Dec 12, 2013
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Does light experience time

"Have you ever noticed that time flies when you're having fun? Well, not for light. In fact, photons don't experience any time at all. Here's a mind-bending concept that should shatter your brain into pieces.
...
Let's do a quick review. If we want to travel to some distant point in space, and we travel faster and faster, approaching the speed of light our clocks slow down relative to an observer back on Earth. And yet, we reach our destination more quickly than we would expect. Sure, our mass goes up and there are enormous amounts of energy required, but for this example, we'll just ignore all that.

If you could travel at a constant acceleration of 1 g, you could cross billions of light years in a single human generation. Of course, your friends back home would have experienced billions of years in your absence, but much like the mass increase and energy required, we won't worry about them.

The closer you get to light speed, the less time you experience and the shorter a distance you experience. You may recall that these numbers begin to approach zero. According to relativity, mass can never move through the Universe at light speed. Mass will increase to infinity, and the amount of energy required to move it any faster will also be infinite. But for light itself, which is already moving at light speed… You guessed it, the photons reach zero distance and zero time."

rest at link

Makes sense.
 
A couple of photons took a two week vacation.

Two questions.

If they lie down at the beach, will they get a good tan?

And, is two weeks enough of a vacation when time flies like that?
 

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