Wednesday 17 June 2009

Speed of Dark

How quickly can you guess who this is?;

I think I'm a perpetual motion machine.

Nothing - and nobody - can go faster than me.

I'm a kalidascope with the whole spectrum of colours.

I have a shaking feeling, changing as I'm stretched & squeezed.

If I squeeze myself up or stretch myself out you'll no longer see me.

I think I'm over 10 billion yrs old, and I've been travelling my whole life.

I have identical clones, spreading out, everywhere in the universe.

I hit, bounce off, go through things but always return to the same speed.

I've spent my life dark and cold, but I'll brighten thing up when I arrive.

I have limitless energy. If I stop in some B-E condensate I can get straight back up to speed in an instant, and keep at that speed exactly come rain or shine, with crowds of others like me going in every direction around me.

I'm both a wave and a particle at the same time. I am a wave bundle, I am light. I am the perpetual paradox, yes, I am a photon.

But where do I get all that energy? you ask, and how do I live on, and keep at exactly the same speed for billions of years without breaking the laws of physics? I have the energy of my zero mass multiplied twice by the speed of light! (E = mc2) = 0. I'm tired out!


Hmmm. Perhaps the energy all comes from the dark energy field itself (that we're told makes up most of the universe). But that means it's the dark energy that controls the speed of our wave functions, all waves, from gamma to radio. Maybe the 'particles' are just localised things.

So what's light got to do with it anyway? Perhaps it would be more accurate to call 'c' the speed of dark!?

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