Today is the sixth time I participate in Linda Hill’s streams of consciousness. To read about the rules and participate click here. To read my five previous entries click here “Prediction Failures and My Lucky Day from Hell”, <<Link-3>> or here “The Review Wars on Amazon”, or here, “Reindeer Hide Memories”, or here “25 Sweet Leonberger and Dog Photos”, or here “Bad Travel Memories”. <<Link-7>> I put this post on my Super-factful blog because it is factual and not related to Leonbergers. “Everything is in Motion” could be a super fact, but a super-fact post requires editing, looking up facts, or verifying facts, and lots of links, so that is for another post. This post is just my musings.
Today’s prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday September 5, 2026, is “Motion”. Use it anyway you’d like. The first rule is: there should be minimal planning and no editing except typos. I did not edit but I did add a few pictures. I like adding pictures. I just copied the pictures including captions from a few of my other posts.
The first thing that came to my mind for this prompt was that Motion is relative and everything is in Motion. You may be sitting in your chair completely still thinking that you are not moving but you are. Earth rotates around its axis at hundreds or thousands of miles per hour and you follow along wherever you are sitting. Sitting at the geographic north Pole won’t help you because Earth is also wobbling and it is rotating around the sun at more than 60 thousand miles per hour, and the sun is rotating around the center of our galaxy the Milky Way at several hundred thousands miles per hour, and our galaxy is moving compared to the Andromeda galaxy at millions of miles per hour, and it moves billions of miles per hour compared to other galaxies.
Motion is not absolute. It is always relative to something else. The universe has no center, no ether to compare with, there is no absolute reference point. It is not possible to declare anything as truly standing still. Understanding this is the first step towards understanding the theories of relativity.
You could of course say that; well, compared to my reference frame, my room right here, I am sitting still. I am not in motion compared to my chair. So, in that sense it is possible to say that I am not in motion. Well, I am sorry to disappoint you. You are still moving through time at the speed of light. To bring up relativity again, space and time is a four dimensional continuum, and space can be converted into time and vice versa. The conversion factor between space and time is a constant identical to the speed of light in vacuum. Without explaining the details this means that you when you are sitting absolutely still in space, relative to something like your chair, you are still moving through time, in that reference frame, at the speed of light. You see “Everything is in Motion” is an unescapable fact.
A related interesting fact is that nothing that has mass can move through space at the speed of light. Everything that has mass must move slower than the speed of light through space. Conversely, particles that do not have mass, such as light particles (called photons), and gluons, must always move through space at the speed of light, and as a result for them time does not move. Actually, for them time does not exist.
There are a couple of obvious objections to the last paragraph. Very far away, beyond the limit of the visible Universe, galaxies can move away from us faster than the speed of light. However, they are not moving faster than the speed of light compared to the space where they are. What is going on is that space and time are stretching fast due to the expansion of the Universe. Another objection is that light can move slower than the speed of light in vacuum through transparent materials such as glass and water, so how can the claim that all massless particles must always move at exactly the speed of light in vacuum be true? The answer to that is that the light particles (photons) in those materials are being absorbed and re-emitted as new photons by the atoms. However, in between the atoms the photons move exactly at the speed of light in vacuum.
Anyway, the conclusion is, “Everything is in Motion”, through space, and through time.
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