[ExI] photons, both here and there

[Damien Broderick]

On 1/23/10, The Avantguardian <avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Thus in their own
> frames of reference, photons from a source never leave the source, and their
> source and their destination is one and the same. They don't move, because
> they have no space or time with which to move within. They are always in
>  contact in the same point in 2D space at the same instant in time even if
> from the reference frame of slow moving matter their source and destination
> is separated by millions of light-years.

Ah ha, in my recent ASIMOV'S story, "This wind blowing, and this tide", 
my character muses:

<	This thing on Titan had been tugging at me, at my absurd and 
uncomfortable and highly classified gift, since I was four or five years 
old, running in the streets of Seoul, playing with a Red Devils soccer 
ball and picking up English and math. A suitable metaphor for the way a 
child might register the substrate of a mad universe, and twist its 
tail. My own son, little Song-Dam, plagued me with questions when he, 
too, was a kid, no older than I'd been when the starship buried under 
tons of frozen methane and ethane had plucked for the first time at my 
stringy loops.
	"If light's a wave, Daddy, can I surf on it?" Brilliant, lovely child! 
"No, darling son," I said. "Well, not exactly. It's more like a Mexican 
football wave, it's more like an explosion of excitement that blows up." 
I pulled a big-eyed face and flung my arms in the air and dropped them 
down. "Boom!" Song laughed, but then his mouth drooped. "If it's a wave, 
Dad, why do some people say it's made of packets?" "Well," said I, "you 
know that a football wave is made of lots and lots of team supporters, 
jumping up and sitting down again." He wasn't satisfied, and neither was 
I, but the kid was only five years old.
	Later, I thought of that wave, sort of not there at all at one end, 
then plumping up in the middle, falling to nothing again as it moved on. 
Follow it around the bleachers and you've got a waveform particle moving 
fast. Kind of. But for a real photon, you needn't follow it, it's 
already there, its onboard time is crushed and compressed from the 
moment of launch to the final absorption, just one instantaneous blip in 
a flattened, timeless universe. Why, you could jump to the Moon, or 
Ganymede, or even Titan, all in a flash. Just entangle yourself with it, 
if you knew how (as I showed them how, much later), like Mr. Meagle 
remote viewing his impenetrable stationary starship.>

Damien Broderick