# Would time freeze if you can travel at the speed of light?

I read with interest about Einstein's `Theory of Relativity` and his proposition about the speed of light being the speed limit for anything with mass. So, if I were to travel in a spacecraft at the speed of light, would I freeze and stop moving? Would the universe around me freeze and stop moving? Who would the time stop for?

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Since you can't move at the speed of light, you should phrase this question about travelling at less than the speed of light. – Ron Maimon May 28 '12 at 7:23
even so time would not change for you individually only if you returned to the place that you started would you realize that you have had a different experiance of time without returning to compare your time/ageing with the origin of your travels you would not experiance for instance slow motion or any such observable discrepency – Argus May 28 '12 at 18:07
Does the "place" actually have anything to do with it. I've seen this in documentaries, well the "3" I've watched, and they use this idea but isn't the idea to do with relative velocity? i.e. if you went out into space for 1 light year and then returned all at the speed of light, and I stayed in earth orbit going round and round at the speed of light for 2 years there wouldn't be any relative difference between you or I would there? Clearly u would have had the better time but age wise = same? – rism Aug 5 '12 at 4:21

## 7 Answers

Yes, I agree with David. If somehow, you were able to travel at the speed of light, it would seem that 'your time' would not have progressed in comparison to your reference time once you returned to 'normal' speeds. This can be modeled by the Lorentz time dilation equation:

$$T=\frac{T_0}{\sqrt{1 - (v^2 / c^2)}}$$

When traveling at the speed of light ($v=c$), left under the radical you would have 0. This answer would be undefined or infinity if you will (let's go with infinity). The reference time ($T_0$) divided by infinity would be 0; therefore, you could infer that time is 'frozen' to an object traveling at the speed of light.

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– Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams May 28 '12 at 19:43

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I'm kind of wary about using the phrase "if you were able to travel at the speed of light," because you can't, and in my experience when you say anything less than "this is unequivocally not possible" people start to get ideas that they really shouldn't. Although this does get the point across. – David Zaslavsky♦ May 29 '12 at 17:49

You can't travel at the speed of light. So it's a meaningless question.

The reason some people will say that time freezes at the speed of light is that it's possible to take two points on any path going through spacetime at less than the speed of light and calculate the amount of time that a particle would experience as it travels between those points along that path. The calculation is

$$\Delta\tau^2 = \Delta t^2 - \frac{1}{c^2}(\Delta x^2 + \Delta y^2 + \Delta z^2)$$

where $\Delta\tau$ is the amount of time experienced by the traveling particle, and the other $\Delta$'s are the differences in space and time coordinates between the two points as measured by an external observer. If you take this same calculation and blindly apply it to a path which is at the speed of light, you get $\Delta\tau = 0$.

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nice answer, but probably not at the level of the op – Larry Harson May 28 '12 at 16:41
Hey, nothing wrong with exposing people to a little math ;-) – David Zaslavsky♦ May 28 '12 at 17:00
Photons travel at almost fully that speed all the time, except in glass, air, not quite empty space. They seem to never get bored. – roadrunner66 Mar 12 at 7:50

It is not that time "freezes" or "resumes", but rather that an object moving at a certain speed experiences time differently. Time still proceeds at one second per second regardless, and an object moving at light speed will still take one year to cover one light-year; what changes is that for that object, time appears to pass much more slowly.

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Velocity is relative, so it doesn't matter if you're "travelling" at some speed relative to something, or something is travelling at some velocity relative to you - the effects are the same. Right now you have objects in the universe travelling at a wide range of velocities relative to you. If you decided to change your speed to close to the speed of light compared to what it is now, you will find that there is still the same range of velocities of objects relative to you. That's because objects that were travelling close to c in the direction of your increase will have slowed down, and objects that were travelling in the opposite direction will have increased their velocity.

However, you will also find that as objects increase their speed relative to you, the sequence of events there slow down, and that includes the running of their clocks from your view point, which approaches zero as their speed approaches the speed of light.

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I'm a total novice but i watched NOVA's "Brian Greene's Fabric of the Cosmos" on YouTube and as i understand it, "your" space and time share a finite amount of energy at any given moment called Space-Time.

So the finite amount energy available at any given moment can be consumed "either" by motion through space or ticks of some clock.

But the more you use that energy for one aspect of SpaceTime i.e. motion or ticks, the less there is for the other... kinda like the way your computer seems to run slower the more programs you run at once i.e. a finite amount of processing power is available at any given moment to be distributed among applications.

The upper limit of motion being the speed of light.

So the closer you travel to the speed of light the more energy for a given moment is assigned/consumed by motion, leaving less and less energy for time to tick (relative to someone else). Therefore the slower time goes (relatively speaking).

So the faster you go, the slower time "appears" to go relative to a slower observer because most of your space time energy is being consumed by motion whereas more of theirs is being used for time to tick.

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You seem to have gotten a garbled message here. It is true that all inertial observed can agree on the "interval" between to points in space-time and that the interval is calculated by using space and time components with opposite signs, but the rest is a bit of a mess... – dmckee♦ Aug 5 '12 at 5:23

The time wouldn't freeze. Instead, all events in the world will happen at the same time and place (from the viewpoint of the observer travelling at the light speed).

It would be better to say that the world (i.e. space & time) would collapse into single point.

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Hibernation is one way to freeze time,that is to arrive at future date,the natural way to time travel. Linear or circular movement at very high speed is the scientific theory to reach future.

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