Speed of light would not stop time..?

You wrote:

> They say time stops because we could do an infinite amount of anything at that speed.

That's not actually what they say. What they (physicists) say is: Anything that travels at lighspeed experiences NO TIME at all (which means: it is frozen in its existing state and cannot change). This is exactly the OPPOSITE of being able to do "an infinite amount of anything."

It is not as though time stops "all around you" while you are personally left untouched. Not only does your wristwatch slow to zero, but so does your heart rate, your breathing, your walking, the neural signals to your brain, everything. You're frozen, as if you were in some kind of physics coma. (Of course, it doesn't "feel" that way to you. Since your mental activity is frozen, you can't experience it as a slowdown in time. If you travel 10 lightyears, everybody else (whom you left on earth) says your trip took 10 years. But from your point of view, it feels as though you "instantly" teleported 10 light years away.)

Material objects can't travel at exactly the speed of light (based on the very same theory that predicts the time slowdown); but they can get arbitrarily close to it. Say an astronaut were traveling at 99.99% of lightspeed (relative to you). If you could observe that astronaut, you would see his clocks and his daily activities proceeding at a snail's pace; slowed down by a factor of about 23, in fact. If he were to inch closer to lightspeed, his internal clocks would slow down even more. He can't do an infinite amount of anything. He can do practically nothing!

The speed of light is constant, time is the variable. That's the head twister. At the speed of light an object will have infinite mass, no length and time will stop. Relax, on the space station the clocks run 1 1/2 seconds slow over a year to compensate for the speed.

It's simply not plausible to think that we could do an infinite amount of anything at the speed of light. That's like thinking that an organism smaller than an atom (obviously made up of sub-atomic particles - hypothetically) is omnipresent, but an atom is just an atom, not the root of all mass or space. In the same way, the speed of light is just one speed, not the root of all time. It's all relative: if we could see Gamma Rays, or even faster EMR, then the speed of light to us would be even faster, wouldn't it? Time is on an infinite scale and it is always happening, whether it is a microsecond or a millenium.

No, not at all...consider L(v) = sqrt(1 - (v/c)^2), which is called the Lorentz trasnform. It is the relativisitc factor in something called tiime dilation, which is what you are talking about.

T = t/L(v); where t is rest time (the ordinary tiime you are experiencing right now), T is relativistic time (the time interval you would see on board whatever is traveling near light speed), v is the speed of that thing going very fast, and c is light speed in a vacuum.

If we examine L(v), we see that L(v) --> 0 as v --> c. That is, as the speeding thing approaches light speed, the Lorentz transform approaches zero.

And see what that does in T = t/L(v) = t/L(v ~ c) ~ t/0 ~ infinity. That is, for us on Earth, for example, watching (if we actually could) a ship go nearly light speed v ~ c, we'd see rest time t = 1 sec on Earth take T ~ infinite time to tick off one second on board the ship. That is, for all intents and purposes, time would stand still on that ship as far as the observers on Earth were concerned. Note that light speed is limited, it is not infinite; so, contrary to what you suggest, v need not be infinite to attain T --> infinity.

Even so, on the ship, time would seem to be normal rest time. That is, one second would still be one second as far as the crew were concerned. Such is the nature of relativity...time is relative to the frame (e.g., the ship or Earth) of the observer...which is why we call it the theory of relativity.

This is about relativity, not locality.

For example, if someone were to be moving at the speed of light, relative to you, your observation would be that they are motionless (time for them has stopped).

To that person, the world around them would be moving by at an infinitely fast pace. At a speed almost at the speed of light, for him/her, in 1 local second, thousands or millions of years could slip by in the universe around him/her. Its a bit like time travel (into the future only).

You would not stop time locally, however. That would always go at what seems like the same rate to the observer.

This is all based on IF you could reach the speed of light.

Time doesn't stop at the speed of light. There is just no time that passes from the reference field of the object moving the speed of light. Time doesn't stop, there is no passage of time at all.

If I am moving at the speed of light from the Sun to Earth, I will think that I moved INSTANTANEOUSLY while everyone in a stationary position compared to my movement (people on Earth) will think it took me 8 minutes.

Theoretically, anything with mass can not move at the speed of light because it would take an infinite amount of energy to accellerate to that speed. It doesn't have anything to do with the atoms of our bodies being in two places at once (because they aren't).

I believe there also is the problem of ones mass increasing as they reach the speed of light. Not only would you need infinite energy, don't you also become infinitely massive?

You may want to read "A brief history of time" by stephen hawking. I think your concept of general and special relativity are a little warped, and I don't mean warped; and I don't mean like its in the presence of a large mass.

The speed of light by no means gives you an ability to do infinite anything. It is a set number, more or less, in a vacuum.

Speed of light slows down time but never stops time

Time doesn't stop at the speed of light. It is impossible to reach the speed of light. There is no such speed for massive bodies.