Time is weird stuff. When you can tell what altitude your atomic clock is by the offset in its notion of time with the clock at your side, you start to get an inkling about that.
The professor who taught quantum mechanics at USC when I was there used to joke that God told Adam and Eve that it took 7 days to create the universe, but we know from our observations that it was closer to 14 billion years. Given these two data points we can calculate how close to the speed of light God was travelling when he created the universe ...
Interesting to think of time as actually stopped though to an outside observer. Not sure what a photon is when it isn't moving at all, perhaps a point with an electric field and equal and perpendicular magnetic field.
Smolin's book on time is interesting. One of the points he makes is that we are limited in our thinking about the universe by using a language that does not model time - mathematics. Sometimes I wonder if we want things to be fundamentally pure and stateless because we find change so stressful.
Yes, but this is a physics professor making jokes to an audience of physics students. Why shouldn't he refer to special relativity? It's part of his training and the training of everyone who can hear him.
I'd be more surprised if the joke came from, say, the professor teaching egyptian hieroglyphics.
Apropos of nothing at the time I took it the title was 'Modern Physics' which basically was the senior physics class and covered a mix of things from some cosmology, relativity, quantum mechanics, and various papers that had come out the summer before.
The professor who taught quantum mechanics at USC when I was there used to joke that God told Adam and Eve that it took 7 days to create the universe, but we know from our observations that it was closer to 14 billion years. Given these two data points we can calculate how close to the speed of light God was travelling when he created the universe ...
Interesting to think of time as actually stopped though to an outside observer. Not sure what a photon is when it isn't moving at all, perhaps a point with an electric field and equal and perpendicular magnetic field.