So, at least the heat from that star continued to reside where it was until our eyes caught it.
But the photon was allowed to move, without bringing with it the heat.
But the photon couldn’t leave until it had “permission” and that permission was given billions of years ago. Bizzare. It seems to point to an “inter connectedness of all things” at an extremely intimate level.
And think about this: according to Big Bang/Expanding Universe the star of origin of the photon that lands on my retina got “permission” to leave billions of years ago when they were actually in much closer approximation. So how did that photon somehow “know” where the atom in my retina would be when it finally finished the journey. It is almost like the analogy of “Breaking” the racked balls in billiards. At the origin of “The Big Bang” every subsequent interaction between atoms was already known and programmed when they were all in actual direct contact.
Ponder your comments for just a moment. I think the actual energy transferred is considered to be carried in the photon itself. Otherwise the photon would be more like a wire that was in contact at both ends.
I think i have it. Go back to our space station trying to radiate heat. Cosmologists tell us that the space available to the Universe may be infinite but the Universe itself is not. How do we know? If there were an infinite number of stars the night time sky would be a fairly uniform “glow” and it obviously is not. So if there was an infinite amount of mass out there to dump heat to our space station would have no problem. It could boil off heat in all directions instantaneously. It would be interesting to have a freeper come along here who actually new what he was talking about and comment. Actually now that i think about it I may have figured it out. The problem our space station has is not that the IR photons it needs to radiate need to have “permission” to leave but rather it is limited in the available targets because space is mostly empty and the Universe is not infinite. Sorry. This entire thing was just my silly mind fooling itself into thinking there was something here and there really is not. Never mind.