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Wednesday, March 22, 2023

Re: "Distant Starlight Proves the Universe is Billions Upon Billions of Years Old"

 from the 52:58 mark --

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But what about light? What did this [Special Relativity] mean for light's experience of space and time? Travelling at the fastest speed possible in the universe, the effects of relativity become extreme.  Very Extreme.  All distances shrink to zero.  As does the time taken to cover these zero distances.  And so, for photons, no matter how far they travel across the universe, not a single instant of time will tick by.  Even though this light may have existed in time and space for many years [i.e. in time] or light years [i.e. in space], even though it would have been clearly formed by one electron in one location and vanished when absorbed by another electron in another location, the space-time distance between these two events would be exactly zero.  To the photon, it is born and dies at precisely the same moment. To the photon, it is as it it had never existed at all. [I'm not convinced that this last statement stands up.]

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Another way to say the above is that from a photon's "point of view" or "frame of reference" it exists *simultaneously* at all times and at all points in space on the particular path which it takes from its creation to its destruction.

I had grasped this point about light with respect to Special Relativity, all on my own, years ago.  This is why I have never been impressed with, nor intimidated by, the "Distant Starlight Proves the Universe is Billions Upon Billions of Years Old" assertion.

EDIT: What I mean is that it seems to me that the "Distant Starlight Proves the Universe is Billions Upon Billions of Years Old" assertion is based upon disregarding physics following Einstein and instead treating the now-considered-erroneous Newtonian physics as the measure by which to understand the universe.

https://youtu.be/bAedYtUredI?t=3179

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