Re:“Spookiness” Confirmed by the First Loophole-Free Quantum...
by evincarofautumn on Friday August 28, 2015 @04:41AM
(#10134316)
Oh wow, thanks for the eye-opener. Was it a different term than length-contraction that I was looking for? I thought that acceleration toward c resulted in the contraction of distance, and at c the distance would simply be reduced to zero. Where did I miss the point?
This is not correct. Length contraction, as a concept, doesn't apply to photons, because there is no inertial frame in which they are at rest. Or, to put it another way, length contraction and time dilation arise from the way that Lorentz transformations act on timelike and spacelike vectors; they rotate them (in the hyperbolic sense of "rotation"). But Lorentz transformations act differently on null (lightlike vectors): they don't rotate them, they dilate them (physically, this means that changing frames changes the frequency/wavelength of photons, rather than their speed).