this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2023
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I was using the wrong term. Photons don't have a frame of reference.
But even from the colloquial definition, photons don't have perspective. They don't live and die because they never experience time. If you had their point of view, your beginning and end would happen simultaneously, meaning you wouldn't experience anything. They are immutable particles whose only interactions are emission and absorption.
I just want to say how much I appreciate those discussion. They remind me of how little I know even though I'm considered an "expert" in my field of work.
There's a difference between time not passing and not existing. To a photon, space (in the direction of its movement) doesn't exist, as its origin and destination points are the same. But time does not pass - the axis of time is there, but the photon never budges in either direction, like a rock buried in the middle of the desert doesn't move in any spatial direction on a human timescale. The photon's beginning and end aren't simultaneous, quite the opposite. Since it can't move in time, they might as well be infinitely far apart.