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terrestrial measurments coincide. The other explanation would be to realize that all the clocks in the laboratory (and, indeed, in the rest of the world) are wrong by the order of t"/t'. But does v represent 30 kps, or 270 kps, or something else entirely different?

So it would appear that for one inertial system going faster than another, time is as real as it gets, but also, indeed, relative.

In fact, it seems that by inserting c for v in our conclusion above (let v = c), laboratory time slows to zero, leading to the uncomfortable idea that if we were to ride along with a photon crossing 18 billion light years of the known universe, the trip would be instantaneous.

Lest we be disturbed by the philosophical implications of this, recall that some fringing effects were recorded by previous interferometry, albeit thought to be of a magnitude well below machine error. So perhaps we don't know EVERYTHING yet.

But this led Einstein to formulate the fundamental postulate of Relativity, insisting that, "The Laws of Physics are the same in all uniformly moving reference frames." In other words, if we're all moving at the same speed, no matter what it is, there's nothing to worry about.

But the worrisome dilemma of a photon experiencing zero trip time to cross the universe no doubt had even Einstein in awe...perhaps even in doubt...a shadow of it seems to surface briefly in his "Electrodynamics" when he wrote, cryptically, on page 12 of the paper:

"For velocities greater than that of light our deliberations become meaningless; we shall, however, find in what follows, that the velocity of light in our theory plays the part, physically, of an infinitely great velocity."

Or as Carl Sagan liked to say, "There's something strange about the speed of light."

I would add that there's SOMETHING STRANGE about space-time.

It is a strangeness that will take perhaps the next generation of scientific revolutionaries to figure out.

Learn more about this author, Joe Murray.
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