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To begin with, I'm clearly not a physicist but I'm certainly interested by several physics questioning.

So, my question here is, according to Einstein's relativity, I understood that travelling at the speed of light would be instantaneous due to space and time dilation. Then, from the point of view of a photon that goes from the sun in direction of the earth, what is the duration of its journey? I know that from our point of view it takes about 8 minutes.

Could you please indicate me if I missed something?

Qmechanic
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Vincent Robert
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1 Answers1

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You can think of it as the limit of the time of travel of any object when approaching light speed.

From the frame of the moving object the distance between earth and sun shrinks, and the time of the trip decreases. The limit is zero distance and zero time, even while the limit is never reached.

It is like the infinite sums in math, that have a defined value, but that value is never obtained for any given number of terms.

But remember that for any velocity, if the traveller measures the light speed coming from the sun, it is not different from what we measure here.

Claudio Saspinski
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