How does going faster than light makes you travel back in time?

[timecore]

But photons are here.So that cannot be true.

 

[Harte]

Photons are massless. Relativity doesn't apply to objects with no mass.
They are also timeless, since they travel at c, a velocity for which there is no time.

Harte

 

[Martian]

Photons are massless. Relativity doesn't apply to objects with no mass.
They are also timeless, since they travel at c, a velocity for which there is no time.

Harte

I know that's what people say, but let's think it through. If photons are timeless, then why does the distance formula apply to them?

distance = speed * time

A photon has a different position at different times, which is exactly the opposite of timeless.

 

[Harte]

I know that's what people say, but let's think it through. If photons are timeless, then why does the distance formula apply to them?

distance = speed * time

A photon has a different position at different times, which is exactly the opposite of timeless.

That's not the distance formula.

I get what you're saying, but the photon itself has no time. The observer, who is not traveling along with the photon, does experience time (of course.)
Your observer is the one doing the measurement. The calculation is meaningless at c. The observer is not at c.

Harte

 

[Martian]

I know that's what people say, but let's think it through. If photons are timeless, then why does the distance formula apply to them?

distance = speed * time

A photon has a different position at different times, which is exactly the opposite of timeless.

That's not the distance formula.

I get what you're saying, but the photon itself has no time. The observer, who is not traveling along with the photon, does experience time (of course.)
Your observer is the one doing the measurement. The calculation is meaningless at c. The observer is not at c.

Harte

Hmm, maybe physics isn't for me. Perhaps I'll have better luck with the LOA & Atlantis thing.

 

[PaulaJedi]

I know that's what people say, but let's think it through. If photons are timeless, then why does the distance formula apply to them?

distance = speed * time

A photon has a different position at different times, which is exactly the opposite of timeless.

That's not the distance formula.

I get what you're saying, but the photon itself has no time. The observer, who is not traveling along with the photon, does experience time (of course.)
Your observer is the one doing the measurement. The calculation is meaningless at c. The observer is not at c.

Harte

Yet we can "see" an earlier time with the Hubble.

 

[Harte]

It takes time for light to get here.

But if you're a photon, you're everywhere you ever were or ever will be all at the same frozen instant.

Harte

 

[TimeFlipper]

@Martian
I believe you were thinking about the experiment some guys did whereby they slowed down photons by passing them through a software liquid crystal..its counterpart is the double slit experiment using electrons..both the electron and the photon will exhibit the wave-particle duality .

Therefore with the photon now going sub luminal velocity you might have used the distance from the firing of the Photon to the part where it hit the liquid crystal as your yardstick (lets say one foot), and estimated that the photon was travelling at 186,000 miles per second compared to the speed of light in free space being 186,282 miles per second...You could then have come up with some math to at least have given other distances (from the release of the photon to its target), a mathematical reasoning..

 

[Harte]

If you'll look into it, you'll find that photons passing through substances do not slow down, they are absorbed by electrons and re-emitted, which delays the light. But the photons go from electron to electron at the usual speed.

The use of a Bose-Einstein Condensate slows light down in a different way. In some way I haven't looked into, photons are associated with particles that have mass in this method, which causes them to slow down. You can read about it here, under the heading "Slowing Light" (scroll down.)

Harte

 

[TimeFlipper]

Yes Hartey, Photons can be absorbed by an atom for example and then re-emitted out again at luminal velocity and this happens so quickly it appears to the observer that their luminal velocity has never altered..

What iam saying is that scientists have come up with that idea of slowing down a photon without it going back to luminal velocity as in my previous sentence..It appeared in the New Scientist Magazine a while back and as your a better researcher than iam, iam sure you will find that article somewhere on the internet

I believe in the Quantum World Photons can have mass or no mass and energy or no energy, but thats another area and thanks for presenting me with the clip