Space/time confuses me. As something approaches the speed of light, time slows down. Well, light moves at the speed of light. So does light, looking at itself, move from here to there in no time?
yes - light really does obey that odd rule.
If you are going at the speed of light time is stop for the object thats going that fast
As something approaches the speed of light, time slows down TO A DISTANT OBSERVER. (Einstein rolls over in his grave every time someone forgets to add this VITAL qualifier) So does light, looking at itself.... HUH? move from here to there in no time..... no, it moves from here to a light year away in a year. The person on the ship approaching c does NOT experience time dilation, but if he looked back at earth, clocks on earth would seem to slow at stop
The speed of light isn't a constant, the velocity of light in a vacuum (known as c) is a constant. The speed of light changes depending on the medium it is travelling through, the denser the medium the slower light travels but different frequencies are affected by the medium by different amounts which is why a prism can split white light into its component colours and why raindrops make rainbows.
Anything moving at the speed of light experiences no passage of time. So yes, you could say that light, looking at itself, moves from here to there in no time. Likewise, when something travels at nearly (but not exactly) the speed of light, their subjective travel time from here to there is reduced. From the point of view of the traveler, it is the DISTANCE from here to there which has shrunk. For example, consider a star which is 4 lightyears (about 24 trillion miles) away. If an astronaut traveled there at 99% of the speed of light, the trip would seem about 4 years long to observers on earth. But the astronaut would say that the trip only took about 7 months, and that the star was actually only about 3 trillion miles away. The odd thing is that relativity says they're BOTH right. time intervals and distances do not have any absolute value, but are relative to each observer.
