CannibalSmith - let there be light

Someone correct me if I am wrong (and I know I take some dangerous assumptions, mostly involving divide by zero error) but I have a potential model of light that may help explain the phenomenon, based around the light as a particle theory.

Basically, light is comprised of photons, which are particles which have zero mass when at rest. If a force is applied to the photon, it will experience infinite acceleration. Infinite acceleration means... infinite velocity if that force is applied for any time at all. But then we enter relativistic speeds, where essentially the fabric of space and time (and indeed matter as well) is torn through.

First, we will imagine the situation from a stationary observer watching an object with a small resting mass being accelerated. As it reaches higher and higher velocity, it's mass increases. If the object were to reach the speed of light, the mass would be multiplied by a factor of infinity. Obviously, as the object nears the speed of light the force required to accelerate it any further becomes greater and greater, and the object will never actually reach the speed of light.

Now, a photon has zero rest mass, so multiplying this by infinity wouldn't make sense, would it? Except we are not actually dealing with infinity for the factor, we are dealing with a number that APPROACHES infinity as the photon accelerates. This brings up limit math, so if we can assume that the resting mass of the photon is not actually zero but is simply so small that it approaches zero, then we are multiplying (the limit as the mass factor due to acceleration approaches infinity) by (the limit of a resting mass approacing zero.) This can be rearrange to (lim m->infinity)/(lim m-> infinity) which, as I recall, can be a real number. So, at some point, from the observer's point of view, the photon eventually goes so fast that it gains a mass. This means that the force accellerating the photon is no longer imparting an infinite accelleration, but a finite one. The math on all this would work out that, to an observer, the photon travels at... c, the speed of light.

Next, we will view the same situation, but instead of an obersver at rest, we will imagine that we are the object being accellerated. If we have a resting mass, our percieved mass does not increase. Instead, time and space contract to an extent that it does not take as long as Newtonian physics would predict to actually reach our final destination, but we also do not percieve that we are travelling as far. This has been experimentally proven with atomic clocks aboard really fast airplanes and whatnot.

The leap in imagination comes in imagining that we are the object being accelerated, except that we have zero resting mass. In such a case we are accellerated such that the time it takes us to get to the destination is zero, but space is compressed so much that we do not percieve having traveled at all, instead the distance between start and end simply compresses into zero. The end result: it takes no time for a photon to reach the final destination, from the photon's point of view. It as is it was simply knocked instantaneously from say, The Sun to The Earth. So, it is meaningless to compare the photons travelling relative to each other, as they indeed do not percieve themselves as travelling.

And the "what about a ship travelling near the speed of light turning on it's headlights" is equally meaningless, as any object with a rest mass can not actually reach the speed of light... either from an observer's fram of reference or from the ship's frame of reference. An observer would experience a time dilation effect, where it appears that the mass of the ship increases. The ship would experience a time constriction effect, where it appears that the distance traveled is compressed such that... the speed of light is always... the speed of light. Because in reality the photon is whizzing by at infinite speed, or not travelling at all.

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