Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

I__Know__Stuff t1_j1jo0or wrote

Reply to comment by mayonnace in Are people in the international space station experiencing time faster than us? by [deleted]

> my birth into existence and arrival on my final destination would be instantaneous. I'd get born, travel, and die at the same time.

This is correct. To an outside observer (us), it takes a photon about 8 minutes to travel from the sun to the earth. To the photon itself, it is instantaneous.

One of the ways that it was determined that certain neutrinos have mass is that there is a nonzero probability of them mutating while they travel between the sun and the earth. If they had zero mass, they would travel at the speed of light, and there would be no passage of time during which they could mutate.

3

mayonnace t1_j1jr7ki wrote

I see, but that's weird.

In this sense, if this time-speed relation is continuous, the faster a thing will move, the less time flow it will experience. And as someone else suggested, if one could accelerate further, then it would have to see things going back, but that confuses me and it's another story, because me accelerating further would require me being observed as going backward too, but I'd be going the same direction... Then perhaps it's an automatic thing that, after this speed limit, the direction of the vector just rotates itself backwards? But that doesn't sound nice either.

I guess we will have to assume, speed of photon is the maximum, and zero is the minimum, and there can happen no bending beyond these extremes due to some dimensional restrictions or something.

Then, in a similar sense, something with zero speed, should experience the whole time being as fast as a moment, like the cosmos gets born and dies at the same time, yet it might have to stay still at the center of the universe for that, because its coordinates should never change to never have any speed, and at the beginning it was a point, I guess.

−1