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by pdkl95
2621 days ago
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Unfortunately when talking about physics, sloppy human languages and our tendency to anthropomorphize when describing very non-human-like things cause a lot of communication/learning problems. Concepts like "experiencing an environment" and "time" don't make sense for the photon, which is sort of equivalent to "moving at c" because experiencing something like "time" requires interactions (events) at different places in spacetime. Saying "neutrino has a very small mass" is roughly equivalent to saying "neutrinos very rarely experience an oscillation event (changing into a different flavor)". The distance between the rare events is the "time" it experiences. These are so far apart in spacetime for the neutrino it's experience of time (the way it evolves over spacetime) is extremely slow. More massive particles are "more massive" because they frequently interact with the Higgs field. More interaction events means their experience of time happens faster. The photon (and anything else with 0 mass) only experiences two events: it's creation and destruction. It moves at c because it's never being slowed down by experiencing interactions. For a very good explanation of this (with helpful animations) this[1] short playlist (6 ep) of PBS Spacetime episodes. [1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsPUh22kYmNCLrXgf8e6n... edit: TL;DR - When speed-of-light particles pause to interact with things (thus moving < c)slowing it down), we say that particle "has mass". Mass is a measure of how frequently those interactions occur (aka how much "time" it experiences). |
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This is not correct. The worldline of a photon contains events between its creation and its destruction. The spacetime interval between any such pair of events is zero, but that does not mean the events aren't there.