What Does a Photon See?
Most recent answer: 02/09/2013
- Richard Broderick Jr. (age 54)
Lincoln, Maine, USA
Hi Richard,
That's an interesting age-old question; in fact, it helped motivate Einstein to create his special theory of relativity. Unfortunately, even given our knowledge of relativity, we can't understand how a photon sees the world. Special relativity simply does not apply to reference frames traveling at the speed of light.
If you tried to apply special relativity to a photon, you would find that its proper time integral (which measures how much time passes in the photon's frame) is 0. So, I'd say your poetic summation is as good a guess as any. However, trying to apply relativity in a frame moving at the speed of light yields unphysical results, so we don't yet know what a photon sees.
Hopefully someday a more comprehensive theory will help us understand the world from a photon's point of view!
David Schmid
(published on 02/09/2013)