What Drives Light/energy

May be a silly question but what force pushes/pulls energy/light through space. It can travel for billions of years accross billions of miles with little or no degredation as though it has perpetual life and motion and as far as I can make out source makes no difference, except to intensity, be it sun or torch.

Aren't you talking about the conservation of momentum?

This is because as something approaches the SOL its time relative to a stationary observer dilates toward a zero passage of time. Thus from our perspective, light doesn't degrade because it doesn't age. It is only absorbed by obstacles in transit.

As far as what impels light, rpenner is leading you right.
http://www.lightandmatter.com/.../ch04.html

Not only light, but anything will travel indefinitely through space unless it encounters something to affect it.

Just wondering if everything is included, what about the simple fact of our life?
I am thinking of time,age and the effects of what we encounter along the way.

If we do not encounter resistance, would we age?
Do you think we age because we meet resistance.

If this is too far off of topic please ignore.

This post has been edited by rethinker on Feb 18 2011, 12:47 AM

So are we saying that the forces involved in creating light be it sun or candle or torch are sufficient to push it to SoL where it stays untill coliding with something.

rethinker an interesting twist as we go faster through space we go slower through time or is that just relatively. If t=o at c then would we live forever at SoL. What would happen if t=0 would everything happen instantaneously because there is no time to slow things down or would everything stop because you need to travel through time to physically move.

Nope.

Light is (photons are) massless -- therefore it travels (they travel) at the speed of light no matter how much Energy it has (they have). It doesn't (they don't ) need to speed up because they are never at rest.

Because it is (they are) massless, its (their) energy and momentum are proportional:

E = |p| c

Conservation of momentum means whatever direction the light moves (photons move), it keeps (they keep) moving in that direction (and always at the speed of light).

Forces can conceivably act on light (photons), but they can only change the momentum, not the speed. (Force is currently understood to be a change in momentum over time.)

We know all this is the case in nature because the most successful description of light is the quantum field theory of massless photons called quantum electrodynamics, and only the most successful description of nature in science is awarded the presumption of truth.

Hello rethinker:

It is biological functions and degradation that age you. While these functions can be effected in many ways, by many things, the fact is the only way to stop aging completely would be if there was some way to stop all motions (change) down to the smallest atomic level. Even atoms will decay eventually, albeit in a very, very long time. If there was some way stop all change you wouldn't be conscious. It takes motions in your brain for you to be conscious too.

In short I don't know how lack of (or reduced) resistance might effect the aging process (it may have some effect); however I'm certain it would not stop it.

Maxila

Gravity and it's opposite entropy imo.

*facepalm*

What drives light? ...... well, if electrons possess a hyperspatial wave-state;- photons might be imaged to be wavicle entities, embedded & integrated within that wave-state. Similarly, matter resides on the outriding shell of a hypothetical cosmic wavefront.

When I don't have a good answer, I take a physics text book and I flip the pages really fast and then jab my finger down onto a page. Whichever word my finger lands on I use. Do this about 12 times and you can baffle newbs; LadyElizabeth, you know what I am talking about.




- meg

Know? ........ moi?

I much prefer the wheel of fortune method;- stick 100 scientific sounding phrases on a large wheel, spin six times and transcribe all results from the 'win' box ...... works for me.

Whir .... clickety-clickety, clonk x 6;-

"Seriously though;- if matter has wave-state, of which, facets transit hyperspace, we'd have a mechanism by which photons could both, journey into past and future."