Sean Carroll
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
I don't think we have a perfect understanding of everything.
That's good.
That's good for me.
Full employment for me and my graduate students.
We still have things left to do.
But I think you need them all.
There's no one answer there.
What a great question.
People love this question.
I get this question.
And they don't like the answer, which is that photons don't experience things.
They're just single particles.
Electrons don't experience things either.
I think that we get in trouble because we are complicated creatures, right, with senses and memories and things like that.
And so we have a feeling for what it is like for time to pass.
And that wouldn't apply if we were moving at the speed of light, because then no time would pass.
But
When we talk about the wavelength of a photon or its path through the universe, we're not talking about its inner experience.
We're not talking about its first-person point of view.
We're talking about what it looks like to us.