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AHA! very clear,thanks.that`s a funny thing about photons though, having no mass. presumably, this is why they can go so fast,without experiencing time and mass dilation - so any journey by a photon will take no time whatsoever (from the photon`s point of view)
i hope they find the higgs boson soon, since it may be the key to some kind of mass cancelling technology, enabling light speed travel for solid objects (like a spacecraft)
if you could travel at the speed of light, would you be blind?
every light ray would be left behind, and you`d pop out of the light cone into..what? how would you navigate? if you acheived actual light speed,prsumably the time dilation factor rises to infinity, and the entire history of the universe would flash by in an instant while you`re gone, so when you stop, when and where would you be?
hmmm... i just love wild speculation.i mentioned the Higgs particle/ field since rumour has it that it`s the origin of mass, so i thought it possible that applying a counter-field could cancel out mass and thus inertia, avoiding mass dilation and the law of diminishing thrust returns,thus enabling light speed travel.
of course i realise photons are not concious entities, but still must have objective existence to be affected by other phenomena. recent laboratory experiments have ``slowed down`` photons to almost standstill, which you might think would make them easier to study, but deep mystery still surrounds their functionality.
going back to my first question, if light is transmitted by photons being absorbed and re-emitted by electron shells in order to travel, what happens in vacuum in the absence of matter? they just ``become`` electromagnetic waves?
but what is it that is ``waving``?
also, how is the information in a photon preserved when it supposedly hops from one atom to another? light from a distant object has been re-transmitted billions of times when it gets to the eye so why is absloutely no information lost in the process due to accumulation of entropy?