We had a BBQ today with a group of my Hungarian friends. We always try to get together with them when I am in town. There are 4 couples.
One of the guys is an astrophysicist. He is, as you might expect, really, really smart. I use him to bounce ideas off of for my science fiction book. In fact, I have named one of the characters in my book after him.
Anyway, I like to pose questions to him with regards to Einstein and relativity. Black holes, light speed and all of that type of stuff has always interested me.
So today I say, "Alright Gyula (pronounced Jula), suppose I am accelerating on my way to light speed. I want to go to a star one light year away. Now, the closer I get to light speed, the shorter the trip feels to me. As a matter of fact, if I am at light speed, then the trip from earth to the start would appear to have occurred instantaneously although those watching from earth would have seen it take me a year to get there. Am I right?"
Gyula has a funny way about him. He is thoughtful, not because the question is hard, but because he is trying to find an answer that someone like me can understand. Eventually, he says, "No, you cannot travel at the speed of light because you have mass. It would take infinite energy to accelerate any amount of mass to that speed."
I am ready for this answer and come back with, "Suppose a photon, which has no mass, and is traveling at the speed of light all the time makes this trip. Wouldn't it seem to the photon that it took zero time to travel one light year? In fact, couldn't this same photon travel a million light years and have no time seem to pass? Going even farther, since no time is passing as it makes these trips, couldn't the photon make an infinite amount of trips since they all take zero time? In fact, wouldn't it appear to the photon that it was in all locations all of the time at the same time? Wouldn't the photon think it was the only photon in existence?"
Gyula ponders this one for a few moments before answering, "Yes, but it would be wrong."
This, to me, was a hilarious answer.
By the way, today's picture depicts the infamous double-slit experiment. If you have seen, What the Bleep Do We Know, this is discussed there. The second smartest man in the last hundred years, Richard Feynman was asked about the results and said, "Maybe everything that can possibly happened has already happened and by observing, we are calling a probabilistic result into existence."
Short blog. Too much BBQ make Jim a sleepy boy.
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j
I'm not sure that photons can think.... But what the Bleep do I know. :)
ReplyDeleteI think maybe the really smart ones can.
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