Monday 14 March 2011

The speed of light

I've been thinking about this subject for something I'm writing; and I'm struck (as many have been) by the thought that from a photons point of view, time does no pass -- light goes from the Andromeda Galaxy into my eye and it seems, to me, to have taken thousands of years to have made the journey ... although for the photons no time has passed at all. This in turn makes me think: we tend to conceptualise light as the ne plus ultra of acceleration; but from the photons point of view it is quite the opposite. Decelerating from c can be thought of a process of accelerating into time. From the photons point of view it is amazing that we are able to travel at the breathtaking speed of one hour into the future every hour.

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