system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Is time an illusion because we don't travel at c?

I'm not really sure what I mean.. so let me try explain. Bare with me, and please provoke questions if I'm not clear enough. I'm trying rather hard to be clear!

Often, I read that a photon traveling at *c* won't experience time. It is everywhere all at the same time on it's journey from point to point.

From the point of view of a photon, if you could reduce it's speed down from *c*, would time be "created" because it was not traveling at c?

I understand the property of mass to be created because of the Higgs field, slowing particles down as they move through it. If this is the case, then is time an illusion created because you are slower than the natural speed of particles, *c*? 

If this is all true, then I want to extrapolate further but my knowledge is like swiss cheese and I'm sure I've fallen into a fallacy here.

**EDIT:** "Is time an illusion" is wrongly worded, it should've been "Is time created". My wording gets flustered.
gpt
Your knowledge is indeed like swiss cheese. The idea about photons is *not* that they experience everything at once, or anything like that. The idea about travelling at c is that you don't even *have* an experience. You cannot possibly create a reference frame travelling at c, period. Because of this, it is indeed wrong to say that photons experience no time or no distance or indeed anything at all.

Yes, if you try to take the "limit" as v -> c you will note that time and distance both go to 0. But this is sloppy, as any mathematician will quickly tell you. You can't take that limit, it's meaningless. Because, in the end, if you're in a reference frame travelling at c, photons you see still must be travelling at c, an impossibility.

Furthermore you can't just "slow" a photon down from c and "create" time. The idea is that photons can't go slower than c because they are massless. You can't "give" them mass. It's also meaningless (even in a thought experiment) to try to "slow" them down.

Lastly, the Higgs field is something that takes quite a bit of legitimate and intricate understanding of quantum field theory to even grasp. Other than believing highly educated physicists on the reader's digest version, do *not* take the explanation too seriously or you'll make leaps that mean nothing like the one you did.

Note: this is a good question and one that takes a good deal of detailed knowledge of physics to answer, but it is ultimately a meaningless one as all of your premises can't happen or are simply not valid because you tried taking a limit you can't take.