I never really thought about it when I was studying all those equations in physics, but when we consider time dilation plus Lorentz contraction, and if you were traveling at c, as a logical consequence you would experience the universe as having collapsed into a plane perpendicular to your direction of travel. Does that sound right? It must be cool to be a photon 
Simonis 860.
Yes and no. I’d imagine you’d get to experience the entire universe, from your moment of creation until the end, but lack the time to appreciate any of it.
Wherever you’re going, you’re already there.
Great question and I don’t have any real answer but that was one thing I always remembered from my school days.
SOL (speed of light) from what I remember travels at 186,000 miles per second. So let’s say the sun exploded and died we would still see it for almost 8 minutes, I think.
There’s always been the theory that if you travel faster than the SOL you could time travel??
But I never understood the topic on Star Trek, they would say they are 5 light years from the space station. Well that means it would take them what, 5000 years to get there? I know it’s not real it’s just a TV show.
I just wish they could travel at 5000 warp.
But very interesting topic.
This is unknown. To say that “matter creates space” has no meaning. To say that “space creates time” may be true conceptually, since without alternate distributions of matter and energy there would only be a single, unchanging, frozen moment–i.e. no “time”–and without space within which to have alternate distributions, the concept of time does not make common sense (mathematical constructs around things like singularities excepted).
It is possible that space, energy and matter are all variant manifestations of some underlying principle/origin/whatever, but no current description models them that way. We have models which describe how matter and energy are interchangeble, but not matter and space, and in fact in current models they are treated as entirely unrelated entities to the best of my knowledge–that is, matter exists “in” space, in current models.
This question brought another question to my mind. Not trying to hijack your thread but here goes.
Two planets one light year apart. One guy on each planet turns on a flashlight at exactly the same time while pointed at each other. Would the light beams meet each other in 0.5 light years? Wouldn’t this mean that the gap between the planets (respective to light) closed at twice the speed of light?
chappy
I’m assuming that that last sentence was supposed to be “…gap between the light beams (respective to planets)”, in which case the answers to your questions are yes and yes. Third-party reference frames (like the planets, where the two light beams are the first and second parties) aren’t really very interesting.
Or, they simply ignore this stuff. You notice in Star Trek all the ships seem to fly in a plane to each other and that they’re always right side up to each other.
Or, the captain will give an order “Full Stop” as if he’s traveling on a road. However, each star and planet is moving in it’s own little direction. “Full Stop” compared to what?
And, then there’s the flying Abraham Lincoln who comes to help Kirk and Spock fight evil in the third and thankfully final season.
You can also imagine a hollow sphere, 1 LY across. If you are in the in the center of the sphere with a laser pointer and spin around in one second, the image of the beam (the red dot) will travel around the circumference of the sphere in 1 second, a distance of 3.14 LY. Granted, it will take the .5 years for the show to start, but it will.
But nothing traveled faster than the speed of light, and no information can be transmitted faster than the speed of light.
I am going to infer a question that chappy didn’t quite ask but maybe was buried in there someplace. Suppose I am a photon coming out of one of those flashlights, and I am measuring the speed of a photon approaching from the other flashlight. Wouldn’t it appear to me that the other photon is going twice the speed of light? The answer is that all the relativistic math says that it will appear to be going exactly the speed of light.
If you are a photon, traveling at the SOL, time doesn’t really pass for you so I don’t think you can measure the speed of other things. Is that correct?