RE: Photons and determinism, part 2
February 25, 2015 at 7:30 pm
(This post was last modified: February 25, 2015 at 7:37 pm by bennyboy.)
(February 25, 2015 at 6:45 pm)Cato Wrote: Perhaps I'm just pig dick ignorant here, but I can't get past the fact that it takes a photon 8 minutes to get to the Earth from the surface of the sun. I understand that if left unimpeded, 8 minutes travel time would 'seem' infinitesimal to a photon, but don't understand the argument how this translates into zero distance.Yes, these are the consequences of Relativity. I turns out that apparent times, distances, etc. change as things move in relation to each other. For example, if a spaceship takes off and accelerates, its clock slows down relative to those remaining on Earth. If the ship accelerates at a high % of the speed of light and then returns to Earth, the astronaut may find that everyone on Earth that he knew is dead, even though he himself has aged only a little. The recent movie Interstellar deals with this theme extensively as a central plot point.
I think it's perfectly acceptable to pontificate about a photon perceiving the journey to be instantaneous; the same as our inability to differentiate nanoseconds from instantaneous. To then state as fact that no distance was traveled by the photon and reason necessary truths from this seems unreasonable.
Anyway, in the case of a photon, which is traveling at 100% of the speed of light, this effect is absolute: the photon's clock slows to absolute zero, and no time passes for the photon, EVEN THOUGH we can measure its time from the sun to Earth from our own perspective. The problems come up because trying to run infinity through formulas, or divide-by-zeroes, breaks the math.
(February 25, 2015 at 7:29 pm)Nestor Wrote: I can never wrap my brain around where that actually leaves "the perspective of the photon" emitted from a galaxy so distant that it can never reach us due to inflation. People have explained it to me before and I'm always just left dumbfounded.My view is that all photons MUST have a destination, or they couldn't exist. I'm also wondering, since in a photon's framework the universe would be a singularity, we should consider that there is only ONE photon in existence, rather than practically infinite ones.
