Thinking Room

When it comes to thinking, I do the most when I'm in the bathroom. But tonight I was in bed trying to sleep and I got some pretty crazy thoughts.

In descending order order of occurrence:

1) Fine! I'll sign up for twitter.

2) "Up where they walk, up where they run, up where they play all day in the suuuuuun!" Fuck, I need to watch the Little Mermaid.

3) When we talk about the speed of light and that nothing can go faster than it, we fail to consider what the speed of light really is. We often think about it as about 300 million meters per second. We say "about" because we think that we don't know what the exact number really is because light moves to fast. But consider this:
We know that light cannot escape the Schwartzchild radius of a black hole. At this point, gravity is greater than all things, one of which being the momentum of light. Light must necessarily have a mass and therefore momentum (or analogous properties) if it is to be affected by gravitational force. To put plainly, light is slowed down to the point that it cannot escape a sufficiently dense mass.
We also know that light is bent by the gravitational force of all massive objects, notably stars. When an object's trajectory is changed it undergoes an acceleration. Acceleration is a vector. For example, when you jump up and down, your velocity is altered by the constant acceleration downward. For every moment in time, you can calculate your new instantaneous velocity by combining your last velocity and your acceleration. There is a point where your speed decreases so much that you stop. Like light at the Schwartzchild radius, you cannot escape the gravity of the Earth.

Now, we can conceptualize what happens when an object like a person slows down. A car travelling at 50km/h decelerates (or negatively accelerates) to 20km/h. We can imagine a car that was travelling fast, is travelling slower, and even a car that is stationary due to an acceleration causing it to have a velocity of zero.

Here is my main point: What the fuck does slow light look like? We imagine things like light turning into longer waves, like radio waves, when they are subject to a black hole. If gravity changes only the frequency of light, then how does it also alter its velocity in the case of gravitational lensing (where light bends around massive objects)?


Shit like that just blows my mind, man. I'm sure someone has it all figured out, but it still keeps me up at night.