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Let's suppose that I am on Point A with a light-beam launcher. My goal is to launch a beam of light to Point B, which is about 8,000 quadrillion light years away. My friend named Jack is at Point B who is waiting for the beam of light.

Immediately upon launching that beam of light to Point B, light will ofcourse...reach that destination within some or 0 seconds as it does not experience time. This implies that the beam of light I launched, has traveled 8,000 quadrillion years into the future IMMEDIATELY upon launching. It has supposedly "hopped" into a different timeframe.

But for me and Jack, it's still on its way. Jack will have to wait 8,000 quadrillion years for my beam of light to reach him. We can discern that light I launched is experiencing time and distance, by this scenario…Well, for an observer at least.

One might say that different things experience time differently. But then again, this is an eye-opener. If this statement is supposedly true, then a few seconds or years after the Big Bang, it's highly likely that some photons were emitted. Would this imply that immediately after the Big Bang...light went through the beginning of the universe to it's end within a tiny fraction of a second? By "end", I am talking about the era when star/planet formation will end, which according to our current cosmological model, looks to be inevitable.

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  • $\begingroup$ "immediately"? From the perspective of the photons sure, but we are currently still in that moment, as the photons are still travelling and have not reached that endpoint yet. $\endgroup$
    – Michael
    Commented May 19 at 9:12

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This is a typical conundrum created in using classical thinking in combination with some relativistic concepts (e.g. photons experience no time)

Infinite time dilation (i.e. no time elapsed for the photons) is immediately related to infinite length contraction (there is no distance to travel) and the only conclusion here should be: the frame of photons is weird.

And not terribly relevant anyway. The relevant measures are the 8,000 quadrillion lightyears that we perceive the distance to be (as distant observers) and the speed of light. And from our perspective, this then takes 8,000 quadrillion years.

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