yes, it's time. not mass. but there is some relationship between time and mass. i mean, refraction works on this same principle too, newton's prism rainbow happens because different frequencies of light slow down going through the material. so there is also that at play as well, just to make it even more insanely incomprehensible. probably basically the light must be stopping to wait for atoms to get out of the way, due to the harmonics between the spins of the matter particles and the light. so i'm not sure if that is exactly the same thing, i can't tell, is it a scale thing? light travels slower through dense objects as well, so could it be that the light is experiencing time distortion?
Discussion
The last time I thought about this, I had decided that light goes slower through dense objects because its being absorbed and re-emitted over and over, instead of just passing cleanly through. I'm not committed to this idea, though.
the idea i have about the invisible clouds of ... well, strange electrons, being the mediator of the effect of gravity, they have mass, so it is entirely possible that our measure of light speed is completely wrong with regard to intergalactic space (the voids between galaxies). it is possible that light speed is WAY faster out there.
this is probably how we can see so far at all, since most of the space between is so "thin" that actually our estimate of distance is also wrong.
Anti-Matter / Dark Matter 🤔?
If a photon has no mass, then how could gravity affect it?
that's the thing, photons don't have mass. neither do electrons. or at least, not normally. EM drive experiments suggest that there may actually be a way to make electrons into some configuration where they have mass because they were able to bump a pendulum with the beam from one that was in vacuum, where there could not have been mechanical transference force, or any other particle but the electrons emitting from the resonator.
it was the em drive that started me on the idea that gravity is in fact mediated by clouds of these special configurations of electrons. and so they would also distort the velocity of photons as well.
the idea that intergalactic space might mean light speed is orders of magnitude faster than we observe here, throws a monkey wrench into the works of estimating the size of the universe. you CANNOT measure distance without triangulation or firing a projectile into the distance and measuring the time. and even then, even at the ranges that snipers shoot, the bullet path, and velocity, and air resistance is affected so much that at the longer distances it's likely to not even be the time you estimate because you assumed uniformity of conditions over the flight path.
same thing would apply to light, i think, since gravity changes the velocity.
I think electrons have always had mass. Its just tiny. I think there's a 6 and a negative exponent involved, but I ain't gonna look it up.
But I'm reminded of old questions... **_Why_** do electrons move further out from the nucleus when they absorb a photon? The books stated that they did, but didn't state why. And what if the whole wavelength isn't absorbed? Is there partial absorption? Does the remaining EM field perturbate at slower rate?
Idk. I pissed off my physics professors.
we can be fairly certain about distances when we can measure them by parallax, to triangulate them, but at a certain distance the parallax differential is not even computable (think like doing math with numbers that require exabytes to represent the precision). let alone the device measuring the angle, that's probably way more limited.
so, how do you anyway decide how far away something is just by the light it sends back to you, if you don't have parallax? the motion of the objects would serve to help bring some ratio to it but even that would fade to zero beyond a few galaxies deep.
this whole train of thought has totally broken my brain though. since we know that light travels slower the more matter is near it, the speed of light MUST be higher between galaxies.