Experimenting with Time?

physics envy · 12-22-2009, 10:17 AM

I hope this doesn't derail this thread any further, but I heard an explanation of time by Peter Russell that I loved. He turned the speed of light around and said that for every 186,000 miles you stretch light out, you get one second of time (at least in our current perception).

The Lorentz Transformation equations (special relativity) show that time, length, and mass all change as we near the speed of light. Anything moving AT the speed of light has mass increase to infinity, length decrease to 0, and time decrease to 0. So light itself goes nowhere, and takes no time to do it.

So if we stretch light out so we can see what's going on inside it...we get some distance (space), some time (1 sec for every 186k miles), and we can have less than inifinite mass.

If we didn't do this, we'd all think everything was happening simultaneously, and we'd think we were all one big entity

12-22-2009, 10:17 AM	#26
physics envy Avalon Senior Member Join Date: Dec 2009 Posts: 8	Re: Experimenting with Time? I hope this doesn't derail this thread any further, but I heard an explanation of time by Peter Russell that I loved. He turned the speed of light around and said that for every 186,000 miles you stretch light out, you get one second of time (at least in our current perception). The Lorentz Transformation equations (special relativity) show that time, length, and mass all change as we near the speed of light. Anything moving AT the speed of light has mass increase to infinity, length decrease to 0, and time decrease to 0. So light itself goes nowhere, and takes no time to do it. So if we stretch light out so we can see what's going on inside it...we get some distance (space), some time (1 sec for every 186k miles), and we can have less than inifinite mass. If we didn't do this, we'd all think everything was happening simultaneously, and we'd think we were all one big entity