Gribbin (1990: 190):
A photon of the cosmic background radiation has, from our point of view, been travelling through space for perhaps 15,000,000,000 years since the Big Bang in which the universe as we know it began, but to the photon itself the Big Bang and our present are the same time. The photon's track on a Feynman diagram has no arrow on it not only because the photon is its own antiparticle, but because motion through time has no meaning for the photon — and that is why it is its own antiparticle.
Blogger Comments:
From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic theory, the two timescales construed here are the dimensions of two distinct processes: the unfolding of the travelling process vs the unfolding of the photon as process. The duration of the travelling process is about 15,000,000,000 years, whereas the photon does not unfold as a process. The notion of 'motion' through time is a category error, as previously explained.
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