Seeing things in their past? You are full of beans!

[TrueBeliever37]

Distance is relative.

See, no reasonable answer. 4ly is a huge distance. If the photon doesn't experience distance by moving, then how does it get from point A to point B?

You appear to just have canned responses, that you just keep repeating. Maybe I am just wasting my time.

 

[Subduction Zone]

Do you expect me to take your misguided opinion over NASA?
Sorry that isn't going to happen.

You could see if I was right. Sadly you not only are rather lacking in a science education, you refuse to learn. Let me help you on this one obvious issue.

Ion - Wikipedia

An ion is simply an atom that has an electrical charge. At high temperatures atoms lose electrons. Hydrogen is only one proton and one neutron, for the most part. Therefore the early "ionized hydrogen" would simply be a proton. It is not that difficult to understand.

 

[Subduction Zone]

See, no reasonable answer. 4ly is a huge distance. If the photon doesn't experience distance by moving, then how does it get from point A to point B?

You appear to just have canned responses, that you just keep repeating. Maybe I am just wasting my time.

You are in no position to judge.

 

[Subduction Zone]

See, no reasonable answer. 4ly is a huge distance. If the photon doesn't experience distance by moving, then how does it get from point A to point B?

You appear to just have canned responses, that you just keep repeating. Maybe I am just wasting my time.

I offered to help you to learn and you ran away. Don't blame me for the answers that you refuse to even try to understand.

 

[AManCalledHorse]

You could see if I was right. Sadly you not only are rather lacking in a science education, you refuse to learn. Let me help you on this one obvious issue.

Ion - Wikipedia

An ion is simply an atom that has an electrical charge. At high temperatures atoms lose electrons. Hydrogen is only one proton and one neutron, for the most part. Therefore the early "ionized hydrogen" would simply be a proton. It is not that difficult to understand.

What are you going on about. It clearly said "When the universe started cooling, the protons and neutrons began combining into ionized atoms of hydrogen (and eventually some helium)".

The subject at hand was light and time. Nice try shifting the goal post but its a fail on your part.

 

[Subduction Zone]

What are you going on about. It clearly said "When the universe started cooling, the protons and neutrons began combining into ionized atoms of hydrogen (and eventually some helium)".

The subject at hand was light and time. Nice try shifting the goal post but its a fail on your part.

you should not use phrases that you do not understand. I merely pointed out an obvious error in the article.

You were the one that brought up an irrelevant article.

 

[Kangaroo Feathers]

Still waiting for an answer on the distance issue - last line in post 472

Hello - How can the photon not experience distance and yet travel so far?

The photon does experience distance. It doesn't experience time. Yes, it doesn't sound like it makes sense, but welcome to relativity, baby. The human brain didn't evolve in circumstances where relativistic speed comes up a lot, so a lot of this stuff is counter intuitive.

 

[Kangaroo Feathers]

Do you expect me to take your misguided opinion over NASA?
Sorry that isn't going to happen.

Where has NASA said anything different? Hydrogen ion - Wikipedia

 

[Kangaroo Feathers]

After the Big Bang, the universe was like a hot soup of particles (i.e. protons, neutrons, and electrons). When the universe started cooling, the protons and neutrons began combining into ionized atoms of hydrogen (and eventually some helium). These ionized atoms of hydrogen and helium attracted electrons, turning them into neutral atoms - which allowed light to travel freely for the first time, since this light was no longer scattering off free electrons. The universe was no longer opaque! However, it would still be some time (perhaps up to a few hundred million years post-Big Bang!) before the first sources of light would start to form, ending the cosmic dark ages.

First Light & Reionization - Webb/NASA

The universe was opaque... with light, it wasn't dark in the way that that a room is with the lights off. But either way, light in the sense of freely moving photons is not necessary for the advance of time. You have the causality backwards. Light moves at the fastest speed possible because it is inertia-less, the fastest speed isn't the fastest speed because light travels at it. If the universe was lightless, C would still be the fastest possible speed.

 

[Kangaroo Feathers]

A wind, water, clouds have no frame of reference but time effects them as it does light, i.e. a photon. It takes time for light to travel.
No one is saying the photon ages, we are saying it takes time for it to travel.

It takes time as the outside observer measures it, not from the POV of the photon. We're not talking about conscious experience. Wind, water, clouds have no frame of reference, but they still experience time, in the most basic sense, they age. A photon traveling at C does not.

 

[Kangaroo Feathers]

See, no reasonable answer. 4ly is a huge distance. If the photon doesn't experience distance by moving, then how does it get from point A to point B?

You appear to just have canned responses, that you just keep repeating. Maybe I am just wasting my time.

The photon experiences distance. It doesn't experience time while crossing that distance.

 

[Subduction Zone]

The photon experiences distance. It doesn't experience time while crossing that distance.

Under length contraction there would be no distance either. As you already pointed out, relativity is far from intuitive. The math does work out and is supported by experiment.

 

[Kangaroo Feathers]

Under length contraction there would be no distance either. As you already pointed out, relativity is far from intuitive. The math does work out and is supported by experiment.

I was trying to make it ELI5

 

[Subduction Zone]

I was trying to make it ELI5

I had to look that one up. Won't work. I have tried to ease them into the idea, but they want the full explanation now without learning the basic concepts.

Zero patience and a constant dependency on Newtonian mechanics dooms them to incomprehension.

 

[TrueBeliever37]

The photon does experience distance. It doesn't experience time. Yes, it doesn't sound like it makes sense, but welcome to relativity, baby. The human brain didn't evolve in circumstances where relativistic speed comes up a lot, so a lot of this stuff is counter intuitive.

Ok - But that is different than the others have been saying , including a video link I watched - they kept saying it didn't experience distance.

Since light doesn't experience time, wouldn't that mean, that if we supposedly saw light from 30 million light years away, that it couldn't be used to prove the earth is that old?

 

[TrueBeliever37]

I offered to help you to learn and you ran away. Don't blame me for the answers that you refuse to even try to understand.

That's not really truthful, because I have tried to understand and reason out what you tell me.

But a lot of the time, I have asked specific questions and the answers I get are things like - I offered to help you to learn and you ran away - or stop embarrassing yourself - or time is relative

There is no way you will convince me of anything with those kind of answers.

You need to actually give an answer with words, explaining what is happening. Go back and look at my questions and actually answer them.

 

[TrueBeliever37]

You are in no position to judge.

An example for the reply to my Post 501

I asked a specific question, and there is your response above.

 

[Polymath257]

But both are zero according to your theory. The theory says Light experiences no time or distance - remember?

Again, there is no actual reference frame for the light. But, 0/0 is an indeterminate.

Here's a different example. Suppose someone was in a spaceship going past Alpha Centauri at 90% of the speed of light. That space ship emits some light towards Earth. Simultaneously (from the view of the Earth), someone starts a clock to see when the light and spaceship reach the Earth.

There are *four* events here to keep track of: the event when the light was emitted by the spacecraft, the event where the clock on Earth was started, the event where the light reaches the Earth, and the event when the spaceship reaches the Earth.

Now, from the *Earth's* perspective, the first two events happen at the same time (because that's when we started the clock), the light reaches the Earth in 4 years and the spacecraft reaches the Earth in 4/.9=4.44 years.

From the point of view of the spaceship, things are quite different. First, it is the Earth that is moving towards the spaceship in this frame of reference. Let's take the event when the spaceship emits the light as our reference. I will use standard Lorentz transformations to determine what the spacecraft understands about the 4 events.

First, the Earth meets the spacecraft after about 1.93 years from the perspective of the spacecraft. That means that the spacecraft considered the Earth to be 1.93/.9 = 2.15 light years away when it emitted the light. The difference in the distances is known as the relativity of distance. The difference in the time is known as the relativity of time.

But, and this is the first *really* strange thing, the spacecraft considered the Earth to be 9.16 light years away when the clock on the Earth was started *and* that it was 8.24 years *before* when the spacecraft emitted the light! Two events that were simultaneous for the Earth were over 8 years apart according to the spacecraft!

Finally, the light meets the Earth after 2.15/(1+.9)= 1.13 years according to the spacecraft.

If light from the nearest star,Alpha Centauri takes more than 4 years to reach us. We aren't seeing that star 4 years in the past. We are finally seeing the light that was emitted 4 years earlier. There is a big difference.

What's the difference? What we see *now* is the light from that star that was emitted 4 years ago. So, anything we see now actually happened 4 years ago. In other words, we are seeing it as it was 4 years in the past.

 

[Polymath257]

Ok if a photon travels no distance, then how does it get here from the Sun? Or from 4ly away?

Since it is sitting still, what would be the train that is carrying it?

The photon *does* cover distance *in our reference frame*.

 

[Polymath257]

Nope - you can't get away with that. From the photon's frame of reference, it (the photon) is sitting still per you guys.

Remember you said the photon experiences no distance. So how does it ever get here from the Sun or say 4ly away?

From the frame of the photon, the sun is 0 distance away.