Alex McColgan

Einstein has proven that for an object travelling at light speed, time would slow down so much that it would be at zero.

If you were to suddenly start travelling at the speed of light towards Jupiter, you would notice zero time passing, but would observe that you have travelled 679 million kilometres.

and then would probably die of the lack of air, the punishing g-forces and the friction burnt along the way.

But what happens if we try to calculate your speed using these figures?

Well, speed is distance over time, so 679 million divided by 0 equals… If you tried plugging this into your calculator, you would quickly run into an error here.

Calculators do not like dividing by zero.

This is because the smaller the denominator becomes on a fraction, the larger the total number becomes.

If you reduce the value of the denominator all the way down to zero, the only way this can work is if your total answer becomes infinity.

If you travel for zero time over any distance greater than zero, you have just travelled at infinite speed.

So, from light's perspective, it is travelling infinitely fast, not at 299,792,458 metres per second.

Let's call that C from now on.

So why is it that everyone else detects light travelling at sea, but light thinks it's going infinitely fast?

What I'm about to share is one possible theory.

It's going to involve a 4D hyperbolic space.

That's quite a mouthful, so let's take our time exploring this space so we know what we're talking about.

To quickly recap on the rules of a 4D space, let's imagine that all of 3D reality has been compressed into a single flat line travelling horizontally across space.

This leaves us free to make everything up or down in this space into the future or the past.

To put it another way, the x-axis represents moving through space, and the y-axis represents moving through time.

This is how we can get the extra dimension, our fourth d. Here in 4D space, time is simply another direction we can go in.

Hyperbolic might sound a little intimidating too, but simply put, all it means is that the lines diverge away from one another, always.