Question on the speed of light and special relativity?

Time won't "stop" because NOTHING with physical mass can ever go the speed of light. You can pick up Tau, which means the faster and longer you travel through Space the "bigger" the gap between your "relative" time and "outside time." There's a great book that explains it (well, a Novel) by Poul Anderson called Tau Zero. Also, if you could travel at light speed, it would STILL take you over 4 years to reach the nearest star! So, yes, you would age, but only by 4 years. A lot more years would have passed on Earth.

Time is "relative." Meaning it changes compared to your mass and speed. If you are really going fast, the outside Universe seems to fly by, if your back on Earth, Times is "normal." Time depends on your speed. The only place Time seems to "stop" is at the Event Horizon of a Black Hole.

Again, only if they can "crack" the Higgs Boson and find a way to "remove Mass" from objects can anything ever go the speed of light. (Not going to happen.)

What you have "missed" is that YOU are not traveling at the speed of light. YOU are watching light travel.

YOU have also missed the FACT that YOU can NOT travel "at the speed of light".

The first error is almost excusable, the second is not.

You can neither "travel at", nor "reach" the speed of light.

Right this second, you are traveling AT 0 m/s and 100m/s and 1 234 567 m/sec and 298 765 432.1 m/s, but not 299,792,458 m/s. Any speed from 0 to < 299,792,458 is arbitrarily assigned based on which coordinate system (also called a frame of reference) we CHOOSE. Its usually convenient to choose the ground to have zero velocity. Of course, the ground is spinning, so that only works for things on the ground that don't go too far or too fast (long distance flights and satellites might get into difficulties if they pick their starting spot to have zero velocity...)

Nothing with rest mass can reach c. That includes all matter. Speaking as if it were possible is nonsense, literally nonsense.

-=-

The time a clock would measure (proper time) if it were traveling at a speed v, is

T = t√(1-(v/c)²) where T is the proper time (time on the clock) and t is the time as observed in the inertial frame of reference you chose to measure velocity in (speed).

When v = c then T = 0. You are correct that for a photon, the proper time of its travel is 0. I can not explain this, nor am I 100% sure that the same equation could be used in the more realistic Theory of General Relativity, which better approximates our 4-D space-time.

If you are familiar with the wave nature of everything, and quantum mechanics, it makes a sort of (vague) sense that light does not "feel" the passage of time. It is both at its source and everywhere along its path at the same time...Sorry, that's as best I can do to explain it. More questions than answers.

If you are traveling at the speed of light and travel one light year of distance, no time will have passed for you. You get into your magic spaceship on Earth, flip the switch, and instantly you are traveling at light speed. To you, it would appear that the same instant you flipped the switch, the magic spaceship stopped and when you opened the door, you were one light year away from Earth.

However, the people back on Earth would see the magic spaceship take off (at light speed), travel for a year, and land on some planet a light year away. Actually, when I say they see the spaceship "travel for a year", that's after they make a correction for the time that it takes light to travel to them. It take TWO years after you leave, for the light of your landing to travel back to Earth.

The time dilation effect is RELATIVE to the OBSERVER on earth, Your ship would appear to have its passage of time slow down to an earth bound observer. If you left with one of two synchronized stopwatches, when you returned to earth, both devices would show the EXACT SAME passage of time REGARDLESS of the speeds your ship obtained.

"the SHIPS clock shows, to the observer on EARTH less elapsed time than the clocks of observers on Earth."

AND the inverse is true... if you are on the ship, looking at earth, the clocks on EARTH appear to slow or stand still... its an OBSERVATION effect only..... Time is an OBJECTIVE reality, not a SUBJECTIVE local phenomenon. If two cars drive away from each other on the highway BOTH appear to shrink, to each other. If one were ACTUALLY shrinking (or slowing down in time) the other would appear to be growing larger (or speeding up in time)... since BOTH observe the SAME phenomenon in the OTHER, we know it is NOT true, just an illusion, an "effect"

think of a laser beamed away into space and your ship flying along directly next to it... once a second, the laser pulses for 1/100th of a second twice as bright.... a "tick" if you will, at one second intervals... you can observe this "tick" cause you are flying next to the beam... in essence, this "pulse" of extra brightness is travelling along the beam... at the speed of light.... as your ship gets closer and closer to the speed of light, the slower and slower these "pulses" or ticks catch up to and pass you... eventually, when you reach light speed, you can travel "alongside" one particular pulse. Does this mean time has stopped? for you? on earth? or just "relative" to your ship and this one particular local phenomenon? if you go just a little bit faster, wont you creep up on and pass previous ticks? does this mean you are travelling back in time? no... because along the total length of this incredibly long laser beam, all the ticks are still moving, at the speed of light, new ones being produced back on earth the whole time. You cant "get back to earth" with out turning around and PASSING by all those other seconds that have been added to the beam behind you... you have NOT "skipped" any passage of time... you just caught up to and matched pace with the passing "ticks" of the clock.... the closer you got to "pacing" alongside a tick, the more you APPEARED to slow down to the OBSERVERS back on earth. Even if you could MAGICALLY teleport back to Earth, the time would have passed. Theres no way around it.

Only the massive gravitational field of a black hole can warp time, and thats a one way trip.

Time does not stop at the speed of light. That is what you are missing.

THAT'S why einstien's theory is incomplete.It leaves infinity.It needs work.great thought.i'm not a believer yet In parallel univerese's or alternate demension's.TIME can't stop in humans because we invented time and we always go into our future!