Does Light Travel Forever?

by | Last updated on January 24, 2024

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Does light travel forever? Light is an electromagnetic wave that doesn’t need a medium to propagate. The strength of the wave, however, can get weaker with the distance, but

as long as nothing absorbs it, the light keeps on travelling forever

.

Does light keep going forever?

Light is a self-perpetuating electromagnetic wave; the strength of the wave can get weaker with the distance it travels, but

as long as nothing absorbs it, it will keep on propagating forever

.

How long light will travel?

The fact that we can see the Sun and stars shows that light can travel over enormous distances (150 million kilometres from the Sun). In fact

there is no known limit

to how far light can travel.

Does light run out of energy?

Can light be destroyed?

6.

Photons are easily created and destroyed

. Unlike matter, all sorts of things can make or destroy photons. If you’re reading this on a computer screen, the backlight is making photons that travel to your eye, where they are absorbed—and destroyed.

Do photons ever stop?

Answer 2: Photons move at the speed of light because they have no inherent mass to slow them down. Because they have no inherent mass,

they can’t really be stopped per-se

, because a photon that wasn’t moving would have no basis to even exist – really all a photon is depends on its movement.

Are photons ageless?


A photon will live as long as it can maintain its inner structural integrity

.

Is a beam of light infinite?

Theoretically, the photon (or the beam of photons, there really isn’t a difference)

can go an infinite distance

, traveling all the while at a speed c.

Why is speed of light not infinite?


Without mass there is no restriction on their velocity

which means they can only travel at one speed; as fast as it is possible to go. Electrons protons and neutrons all have mass, therefore can’t move at the speed of light. Anything without mass will nearly always do so.

Where does light go when you turn it off?

So when you turn off the light switch,

the light doesn’t go anywhere

, the current just stops flowing, which means that there is nothing to give the atoms energy so that they can transition between different energy levels.

Can light be stopped?


Physicists have been able to stop something that has the greatest possible speed and that never really stops: light

. A decade ago, physicists stopped it very for a short moment. In recent years, this extended towards stop times of a few seconds for simple light pulses in extremely cold gases and special crystals.

Do photons live forever?

But if they do have a little mass, they could eventually decay into lighter particles. Now, by studying ancient light radiated shortly after the big bang, a physicist has calculated the minimum lifetime of photons, showing that

they must live for at least one billion billion years, if not forever

.

Why does light exist?

Is darkness a form of light?


No, darkness is not light

, as an object which does not emit or reflect energy is truly ‘dark. ‘ Darkness is light radiation which is in thermal equilibrium with its environment. (It would be fair to say, by this definition, that the interior of the sun is dark.)

Is light just energy?

In fact

visible ‘light’ is a form of radiation, which can be defined as an energy that travels in the form of electromagnetic waves

. It can also be described as a flow of particle-like ‘wave-packets’, called photons, that travel constantly at the speed of light (about 300 000 kilometres per second).

Does light have a sound?


Light does not produce sound

because it is not a vibration on a material.

Are photons immortal?


A photon is immortal if it does not meet some matter on its way, or even another photon

. If it meets a particle, it will interact with some probability given by quantum mechanical calculations. In that sense it is not immortal, because in interacting it may be completely absorbed into new particles.

Do photons have age?

Can you freeze photons?

How long does light exist?

Relativity theory tells us that light has

no time at all

to exist because it moves at the speed of light. The light comes to existence in the torch and it may cease to exist in an alien’s eye. The time in between these two events is the light’s life time.

How many photons hit the Earth every second?

How many reach earth? If we use the 1e45 figure for photons/sec emitted by the Sun, then you get ~

1.8e36 photons

striking the Earth per sec and 4.4e16 photons per sec hitting the eye (assuming a pupil diameter of 2mm.)

Where do photons come from?

A photon is produced

whenever an electron in a higher-than-normal orbit falls back to its normal orbit

. During the fall from high energy to normal energy, the electron emits a photon — a packet of energy — with very specific characteristics.

Is a laser faster than light?

Are all lasers Lightspeed?

Yes, but not in a way you will like.

A laser is electromagnetic radiation which never has mass and will only travel at lightspeed

. While we have slowed down light, it requires a medium or material to do it*.

Does light have mass?

In addition to being a particle, light is also a wave. This allows it to carry momentum, and therefore energy,

without having mass

.

Is light faster than darkness?


Darkness Is Faster Than the Speed of Light

.

Does gravity travel at the speed of light?

Is Universe expanding faster than light?

Again and again we’re told that according to Einstein’s theories of relativity,

nothing in the known Universe can expand faster than light

. It violates the laws of physics. It can’t be done.

What does light turn into?

What happens when light hits the Sun?

What happens to light after you see it?

When light hits the retina (a light-sensitive layer of tissue at the back of the eye), special cells called photoreceptors turn the light into electrical signals. These electrical signals travel from the retina through the optic nerve to the brain. Then

the brain turns the signals into the images you see

.

Does light have memory?

Is solid light possible?


No because solid is a state of matter

. Light cannot be considered matter since it is made up of particles which have no mass and I’m pretty sure occupy no space (i.e. photons have no volume).

What happens if we stop time?

If you stopped time,

all light and sound would stop

, too. In some interpretations, this would leave Strine instantly deaf and blind in his frozen scene. In a video for Play Noggin about the time-stopping video game Superhot, Julian Huguet comes to a similar conclusion, although he thinks it would take a little longer.

How long does light last in space?

In empty space, the wave does not dissipate (grow smaller) no matter how far it travels, because the wave is not interacting with anything else. This is why light from distant stars can travel through space for

billions of light-years

and still reach us on earth.

Where does light go when you turn it off?

So when you turn off the light switch,

the light doesn’t go anywhere

, the current just stops flowing, which means that there is nothing to give the atoms energy so that they can transition between different energy levels.

Charlene Dyck
Author
Charlene Dyck
Charlene is a software developer and technology expert with a degree in computer science. She has worked for major tech companies and has a keen understanding of how computers and electronics work. Sarah is also an advocate for digital privacy and security.