{"id":13352,"date":"2013-03-15T08:52:15","date_gmt":"2013-03-15T13:52:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/?p=13352"},"modified":"2013-03-15T08:52:15","modified_gmt":"2013-03-15T13:52:15","slug":"no-time-for-photons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/archives\/13352","title":{"rendered":"No Time for Photons"},"content":{"rendered":"

Neil deGrasse Tyson explains the timelessness of photons<\/a><\/p>\n

Caveat emptor<\/em>: he’s doing a radio show, so there’s a necessary downconversion of the depth of the discussion. He does err when he implies that massive objects traveling at c is a technological\/engineering barrier, and we just haven’t figured it out (like breaking the sound barrier), rather than a physics barrier that would demand that current theory be wrong or incomplete, with some new physics necessary to explain what’s going on.<\/p>\n

In general the “photons don’t experience time” is a bit of a tiptoe in the mine field, because we can’t definitively say what things look like from a photon’s perspective \u2014 relativity doesn’t afford us a description of what things look like to a photon. The Lorentz transforms \u2014 what we use to see what things are like for massive objects \u2014 “blow up” when v=c, which means that the photon is not in an inertial frame, and all that physics we do is for objects in inertial frames. The reason I hesitate is that an equation diverging from some infinity showing up means that the equation has failed, so the fact that a term is tending toward infinity (or zero) as it fails isn’t a guarantee that infinity (or zero) is the right answer when the equation no longer applies.<\/p>\n

The idea does paint a nice picture, though, and seems consistent with the QED path-integral idea that photons sample all paths and most of them destructively interfere, and what we see is the result, but I think it’s easy to take the idea too far and imply things that don’t have any experimental backing to assure us they are true. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Neil deGrasse Tyson explains the timelessness of photons Caveat emptor: he’s doing a radio show, so there’s a necessary downconversion of the depth of the discussion. He does err when he implies that massive objects traveling at c is a … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13352","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13352","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13352"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13352\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13352"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13352"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13352"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}