if I'm being frank — Noble Dust
Greer was born in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1955. He claims he saw an unidentified flying object at close range when he was eight years old. He claims he saw another UFO when he was 35. Greer was trained as a Transcendental Meditation teacher and served as director of a meditation organization. He received a B.S. degree in biology from Appalachian State University in 1982 and an M.D. degree from the James H. Quillen College of Medicine of East Tennessee State University in 1987. He received his Virginia medical license in 1989 and worked as an emergency room physician, and in 1998 retired as a physician in favor of his ufology activities.
I don't pretend to really understand it, but if I am not misinformed, as jgill pointed out, from the standpoint of the ship, as you approach the speed of light, the distance traversed approaches zero and the time to cross it also approaches zero. It takes a million years for light to cross a gap of a million light years only for an observer stationary with respect to it. For the photon, no distance and no time. — petrichor
If, from the photon's perspective, there is zero distance between its origin and destination, maybe in some sense, rather than there being an actual photon crossing a distance, it is rather a matter of the two electrons on either end just interacting and transferring a quantum of energy from one to the other. One loses an energy level and the other gains one, maybe like a billiard ball transferring its energy to another ball. How it is determined which electron will interact with which other one halfway "across" the universe though is beyond me! It makes me wonder if we really understand what is going on with space and time at all. The model of a photon as a thing that passes through space works as a model, but maybe thinking about it like that gives the wrong intuition about what is actually happening. — petrichor
Time dilation aboard the ship. Lorentz factor. From the standpoint of Earth, yes. Hopeless. From the speeding ship perspective the clock ticks slower. — jgill
how would the electron on the Sun know which electron on the Earth to interact with, such that shadows appear as they do when we are walking along? — wonderer1
That is the definition of light year, how far light travel in one year. — Sir2u
Because of length contraction the faster you go the shorter the distance between two points. So something that is 1 light year away to us is less than 1 light year away to an object moving at near the speed of light. — Michael
Ok, so a rock traveling at the speed of light comes from a star a million light years away to here. At the same time that it leaves, there is a super massive solar flare in the star. The rock arrives here a few years later but we will not see the flare for a million years. — Sir2u
Does light, traveling at the speed of light not get affected by time dilation? — Sir2u
Addendum to the post excerpted above: a SciAm opinion piece by Martin Rees & Mario Livio ...If UFOs are "alien spacecraft", I suspect that they are AI-machine probes and that their parent species are either extinct or postbiological. — 180 Proof
One problem I see with such a view is that photons do seem to travel through the intervening space between the initial and terminal electron. If that was not the case, I don't know how gravitational lensing could be explained.
Closer to home we can consider shadows. From our frame of reference it takes eight minutes for light
to travel from the Sun to the Earth. Yet our shadows on the ground move 'instantaneously' when we move. If it was "a matter of the two electrons on either end just interacting and transferring a quantum of energy from one to the other, how would the electron on the Sun know which electron on the Earth to interact with, such that shadows appear as they do when we are walking along? — wonderer1
Photons travel the whole distance between point A and point B. This can easily be proven just by intercepting them at any point between A and B, Point C. Then try to intercept them at the same time in a different place along the same line, point D. There is nothing to intercept at the point furthermost from the source because it was already blocked. — Sir2u
I expect a debunking by the end of the week. — Baden
I'm not so sceptical I used to be. — ssu
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