This kind of sad romantization of physical phenomena is weird to me.
I think romanticizing physical phenomena can be a really great tool to create a narrative and get people interested in the subject, or can just be a cool talking point about physics.
This example is pointless and kinda sad
If a photon from the sun misses the earth it will likely travel for billions of years into the void, most of them probably absorbed by random space dust. So hitting earth or hitting a human could be considered cool depending how you sell the narrative.
It’s possible to tell many different narratives. I just dislike the sad ones. There are many more cool ones
I’m not as against these “sad narratives” as you are, but I still think that this one just doesn’t make much sense. Photons hit random planets and stuff all of the time, so arguably hitting a living sentient being is one of the coolest things that could happen to a photon.
I think, from the photon’s perspective, the time between emission and absorption is instantaneous (since they’re traveling at the speed of light). i imagine a photon’s journey would feel like utter chaos.
Zero time and also zero distance due to length contraction
If we’re anthropomorphizing photons, lets imagine how it experienced time. Most of those 93 million miles was instantaneous. Then for the the tiniest fraction of a second you’re screaming through thickening atmosphere before hitting someone and making a cone in their eye dance around like one of those fan powered air dancers at a used car lot. Maybe you even bounced off one those fan powered air dancers at a used car lot.
The light is always trying to kill me anyway, so I use SPF 60 stuff, clothing, and various other ways of blocking it so it’s stopped before it even reaches my actual skin.
You stop the light from reaching the ground, I stop the light from reaching me. We are not the same.
Actually we are part of the ground. We are the planet earth, we just move strangely
