Roger&Me
Bluelighter
Been thinking about the universe, wondering why light must*travel...?
*is that so?
not my area of expertise and its been a long time since i've taken higher physics classes, but iirc it's something to do with it's entropic interaction with the time dimension. it's constantly being repelled from the time dimension (and consequently through the lower spatial dimensions) at the highest possible rate because it can't experience temporal entropy (tendency towards disorder mediated via time).
there are probably multiple ways to look at it also. i'm sure there are energetic explanations, thermodynamic explanations, etc etc. that are all different surfaces of the weird manifold of information representing the totality of explanations for the physical universe.
light can, of course, be absorbed (and hence stop travelling and essentially cease to exist by becoming another type of energy) if it comes into contact with a system where the energy barrier between a particle/system's energy levels is equal to its wavelength/frequency. this is what gives rise to colored materials (most dyes have extended conjugations/pi-systems where electrons are far away from the nucleus and easily promoted to higher energy levels, and can absorb the energy from certain wavelengths of light. to get needlessly technical these transitions are called pi-->pi* transitions. certain metals, having electrons in similarly diffuse d-orbitals can also absorb light through d-->d* transitions)
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