If the closer one gets to the speed of light, the slower time passes, and appears to stop at that point, would that mean photons are of zero age? I’m sure this isn’t the case, but I can’t figure out why, can anyone help?
As far as a photon is concerned (if you see what I mean), there is no space because time cannot exist for it.
It attaches what it is emitted from to what it is absorbed by.
(Simplified, of course.)
I don’t really understand that, if it has no time or space how are the things it attaches separate? Or is this just one of those relativity things it’s best to just accept?
Well, the idea that a photon actually ‘knows’ or is aware of anything is, of course, absurd.
So the little picture I described is fanciful to say the least.
It’s just an off the ceiling way of mixing up sub atomic and macro systems and coming up with an amusing idea.
I don’t see anything wrong with saying that photons don’t age.
In relativity photons have null worldlines, this means that if you intergrate the Lorentzian metric along their worldlines you get zero. The worldline is the curve in spaceitme a particle (et cetera) follows.
A Lorentzian metric is a bit like the ‘spacetime distance’, it’s not however really a true metric function because unlike normal notions of distance if the metric between two events is zero it does not imply they are the same event (this is not the only property that distinguishes it from a ‘true’ metric function).
This is relevant because integrating the Lorentzian metric along an observers worldline is how you find the proper time i.e. the amount of time experinced by that observer, so using the standard procedure to find how much time a photon experinces between any two events on it’s worldline you always find it is zero.
Infact there’s an additional problem (but related) in that you cannot construct a frame of reference for a photon in relativity. This can be simply seen from the fact that in relatvity in all locally inertial frames a photon must have a local velocity of c, but on the other hand in it’s own reference frame it must be at rest (have a local velocity of zero). Therefore there exist no locally inertial frames for the photon from which to construct the frame of a photon from.
So arguably without an explicit frame of reference from which to measure the amount of time experinced by the photon, the issue of whether a photon experinces time or not is moot.
Yup, you had it right the first time. Photons are eternal.