In answer to the question: "Does light experience time?" the physicist's answer was "Nope!".
That really depends on which physicist you ask. One who really knows what he’s talking about won’t respond like that. To answer that one has to, at least in principle, be able to have an experimental setup to test such a statement. Since nothing can travel at the speed of light, including clocks, there is no way to experimentally verify such an assertion. In any case what could it possibly mean for light to “experience” time? All this really refers to is an extrapolation regarding things approaching the speed of light. However since nothing can actually attain the speed of light this question can’t be answered, never mind actually accomplishing such a feat.
And think about what it means to “experience” something. The very term means the process of doing and seeing things and of having things happen to you. Since this cannot be applied to time the question truly is meaningless.
However in a very real sense light, which is an electromagnet (EM) wave, exists in time since an EM wave oscillates in time at a particular frequency (or finite to infinite Fourier sum of frequencies). So in that sense light exists in time.
The same is true for distance and mass.
It's one of the things that happens when you create a theory you make assumptions or axioms. It is one of the axioms of special relativity that the photon has no rest frame and hence the theory leads directly back to that axiom.
The question you need to think about is why was the axiom put in place.
There is no such axiom. It’s a simple theorem. The real axiom is that the speed of light has the same value if all frames of reference. Einstein postulated that law so that the laws of electrodynamics would make sense. It’s trivial to show that if the speed of light is always c then there’s no frame in which it’s zero.
According to the Special Theory of Relativity when speed reaches C, then time reaches 0. So distance is speed * time.
That’s not quite right. You’re referring to proper time. That’s the time as recorded on a clock moving in the reference from one is speaking of. No such frame can move at the speed of light if there is a clock in it. If you take the clock out of it then you can’t measure time coming to a stop. That’s why that argument always falls apart upon inspection.
There is a deeper issue here that a photon has no mass but momentum. Momentum by definition requires time but a photon doesn't have time so you can't allow a photon to have a reference frame or else the conservation laws all crash and burn around your ears.
That’s quite wrong. A photon has no
proper mass. However it does have
inertial mass, i.e. the mass that gives a body momentum.
When it comes to defining the momentum of light it’s defined as one defines the momentum for anything else. Consider the momentum of a photon. Let v = the speed of light, m the inertial mass of light (
not the proper mass) and p is the momentum of light. Then p = mv = mc. We know that the energy of light E is related to its momentum p by E = pc or p = E/c. Substitute this in this the expression for momentum to obtain
E/c = mc
Multiply through by c to obtain
E = mc^2
This is the mass-energy relationship that we’re all familiar with.
Nowhere in the rest of the answer, nor in some 30+ comments does anyone mention that this is not universally accepted. No one, that is, until some Bill S. character tentatively chucked a spanner in the works.
You can sign me up for saying that it’s a load of nonsense. It’s an invalid extrapolation, one that real physicists stay away from. Notice that the page doesn’t tell you exactly who made such a claim.
I haven’t read this whole document yet
http://milesmathis.com/photime.pdfbut I do agree with one thing that it says – Since the photon travels it must experience time.
