It says that as something approaches the speed of light.. time will slow down for it relative to the outside world.. right?
And that if something were to acheive the speed of light.. time will stop for it.. eh?
well.. what bout light? light travels at the speed of light.. if time should stop for light.. why does it have a finite speed? why does it take 8 mins for it to get here from the sun?
If time stops for light then shouldnt be everywhere simumtaneously?
2006-11-19 16:37:00 · 2 answers · asked by Dhruv 1 in Science & Mathematics ➔ Physics
It all has to do with frames of reference. For photons, traveling at the speed of light, time stops completely -- from the photon's point of view, its travel from sun to earth is instantaneous. For anybody moving at finite speed (or not moving, if there were such a thing), the photon's speed is 300,000 km/sec. There is a pretty experiment involving mesons, whose decay time is known; they travel fast, but not quite at the speed of light. Faster-moving mesons have longer lifetimes than slow ones because of the time dilation effect.
2006-11-19 16:46:07 · answer #1 · answered by Anonymous · 1⤊ 0⤋
Everything you say is correct. And if you read about special relativity, you can sometimes find the statement that light is in all "places" at once. Mathematically, the interval metric in spacetime goes to zero when v = c.
2006-11-19 16:43:16 · answer #2 · answered by gp4rts 7 · 0⤊ 0⤋