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by jvanderbot 2554 days ago
I mean sure, eventually, over many down link cycles. But not real time.
1 comments

Space travel just makes it utterly clear there is on such thing as real time. Computing is constantly running up against the speed of light.
It's not about latency, it's about power required to transmit. From far away, you need to push lots of power through to get a readable signal on the receiver side. It's kinda-sorta like seeing a flashlight.
In a sense tho, at-the-speed-of-light is real time, as it's the maximum speed of anything.
If, as clock A nears the speed of light it appears that stationary clock B is slowing down, doesn't that mean that at the speed of light is no time? Does a photon in a vacuum arrive instantly at its destination? If a photon looks at another photon, does the other photon appear not to be moving at all, or... Ouch my brain.
> If, as clock A nears the speed of light it appears that stationary clock B is slowing down, doesn't that mean that at the speed of light is no time?

If clock A could reach the speed of light (which it can't), then, yes, clock B would appear to be 'frozen in time'.

> Does a photon in a vacuum arrive instantly at its destination?

From the perspective of any possible observer, no, it always appears to be traveling at the speed of light. If an observer could travel at the speed of light (which it can't), then, yes, it would appear as if it arrived instantly in the sense that clocks at both its source and destination would appear to be not running at all.

> If a photon looks at another photon, does the other photon appear not to be moving at all, or... Ouch my brain.

Yeah, this is tricky. Photons can't look or see – what could that mean as looking/seeing involves detecting photons (or, in the sense that something like echolocation is 'seeing', detecting a pattern of matter, e.g. sound)? In a sense, not moving at all or both moving at the same maximum speed don't seem to be much different, from the 'perspective' of a photon.

Somewhat related, this video describes how, if one could travel on a vehicle that could accelerate at a constant rate continuously for decades, one would eventually see the cosmic microwave background radiation as a rainbow ring because traveling closer and closer to the speed of light would shift the apparent frequency of the radiation first into the visible spectrum (and then beyond it).

My comment was mostly tongue in cheek, I know photons don't have eyes. :)
Not completely related, but you reminded me of something interesting I remember hearing about neutrinos. Apparently (HN physicists please correct me if I'm wrong), neutrinos have an extraordinarily tiny objective lifetime, and the only reason we can detect them is that, because they travel so close to the speed of light, they experience almost no passage of time in while in flight.