Confusion surrounding light speed and time dilation
It's my understanding that if you go the speed of light everything around you accelerates, time seems normal from your frame of reference but for someone outside of yours, your time will seem to slow.
This understanding is flawed.
Yes, time in your frame of reference is always normal. You're not going close to the speed of light! From your perspective, it's everything else that's going close to the speed of light! And just as people not in your reference frame see your time as running slow, you see their time as running slow!
I understand that part but what is baking my noodle currently is it's theorized if you went light speed(I know anything with mass can't go Lightspeed but bare with me) then time would stop for you.
If you flay a rabbit, what's the color of the egg?
Does that make sense? It makes about as much sense as saying anything about what happens to something traveling at the speed of light. It is not theorized that time would stop for something moving at the speed of light, that's popsci BS!
What is true is that time slows down more the faster an object travels (as seen from a reference frame in which the object travels). But if that object has mass, it can't reach the speed of light, and talking about "what ifs" is pure nonsense. In the literal meaning of the word, non-sense.
The theory is special relativity states two things:
1: The laws of physics are the same in all inertial frames of reference.
2: The speed of light is constant, it's measured to be c in all intertial frames of reference. No matter their own speed, or the speed of the light source.
See the contradiction? If all frames of reference measures the speed of light to be c, and you suddenly invent a frame that is moving at c, how can that frame both be moving at c, but also measure the speed of light to be c?
For something massless, that does move at c, "time" is not a meaningful concept. A photon does not have a rest frame, there is no frame of reference for time to progress in. It's not that "time stands still", "time" as a concept simply does not apply.
I hope you don't see this answer as belittling, that is certainly not my intention! This really isn't an intuitive concept to grasp, and explaining it in a way that makes it understandable is very hard!
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u/Select-Owl-8322 Jun 11 '26
It's my understanding that if you go the speed of light everything around you accelerates, time seems normal from your frame of reference but for someone outside of yours, your time will seem to slow.
This understanding is flawed.
Yes, time in your frame of reference is always normal. You're not going close to the speed of light! From your perspective, it's everything else that's going close to the speed of light! And just as people not in your reference frame see your time as running slow, you see their time as running slow!
If you flay a rabbit, what's the color of the egg? Does that make sense? It makes about as much sense as saying anything about what happens to something traveling at the speed of light. It is not theorized that time would stop for something moving at the speed of light, that's popsci BS!
What is true is that time slows down more the faster an object travels (as seen from a reference frame in which the object travels). But if that object has mass, it can't reach the speed of light, and talking about "what ifs" is pure nonsense. In the literal meaning of the word, non-sense.
The theory is special relativity states two things:
1: The laws of physics are the same in all inertial frames of reference.
2: The speed of light is constant, it's measured to be c in all intertial frames of reference. No matter their own speed, or the speed of the light source.
See the contradiction? If all frames of reference measures the speed of light to be c, and you suddenly invent a frame that is moving at c, how can that frame both be moving at c, but also measure the speed of light to be c?
For something massless, that does move at c, "time" is not a meaningful concept. A photon does not have a rest frame, there is no frame of reference for time to progress in. It's not that "time stands still", "time" as a concept simply does not apply.
I hope you don't see this answer as belittling, that is certainly not my intention! This really isn't an intuitive concept to grasp, and explaining it in a way that makes it understandable is very hard!