Have you ever noticed that time flies when you're having fun? Well, not for light. In fact, photons don't experience any time at all. Here's a mind-bending concept that should shatter your brain into pieces.
As you might know, I co-host Astronomy Cast, and get to pick the brain of the brilliant astrophysicist Dr. Pamela Gay every week about whatever crazy thing I think of in the shower. We were talking about photons one week and she dropped a bombshell on my brain. Photons do not experience time. [SNARK: Are you worried they might get bored?]
Just think about that idea. From the perspective of a photon, there is no such thing as time. It's emitted, and might exist for hundreds of trillions of years, but for the photon, there's zero time elapsed between when it's emitted and when it's absorbed again. It doesn't experience distance either. [SNARK: Clearly, it didn't need to borrow my copy of GQ for the trip.]
Since photons can't think, we don't have to worry too much about their existential horror of experiencing neither time nor distance, but it tells us so much about how they're linked together. Through his Theory of Relativity, Einstein helped us understand how time and distance are connected.
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