RIDING LIGHT

RIDING ON A PHOTON

“Uncanny as they are, the basic features of Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity have worked their way into our common stock of knowledge. The speed of light – 186,000 miles a second – is an unvarying constant, and everything else in the physical universe adjusts to it. Seated in their stalled cars at a railroad crossing, impatient drivers see the train whizzing past them, while its passengers see the cars flying past their windows in the opposite direction. That relativity concerns space; but physics locks space, time, and matter together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, so the relativity just mentioned turns up in time and matter as well. If you are hurtling through space, time (your watch) slows down. On a bicycle the slowing is unnoticeable, but if you flew a trillion miles in a fighter plane and landed at six in the evening according to your watch, the clocks in the airport you departed from would read seven. And the closer your plane came to traveling at 186,000 miles per second, the slower its clocks would run, until (if that speed were reached) the plane’s clocks would stop. As for matter, the mass of an object that is in motion increases until, should it attain the speed of light, that mass would be infinite as measured by an unmoving observer.

“Now let us spin all this around and look at it from light’s point of view. Imagine yourself sitting on a particle. On that single “piece” (or quantum) of light you are going nowhere. You are weightless. There is neither time nor space, nor are there separated events. If from the earth it is one hundred light-years to a star, from your position on your quantum of light the star and earth are not separated at all. Moreover, it would seem as if the world were pouring out of you, you and your fellow photons, because light creates. It pumps power into the spatio-temporal world.”

Huston Smith

YOU ARE GOING NOWHERE

YOU ARE WEIGHTLESS

THERE IS NEITHER TIME NOR SPACE

NOR ARE THERE SEPARATED EVENTS

IT WOULD SEEM AS IF

THE WORLD WERE POURING OUT OF YOU

BECAUSE LIGHT CREATES

AND TURN IT UP