Does a photon obey the rules of something traveling at the speed of light?

Answer 1

Obeying PhotonsPhotons by definition travel at the speed of light. They are unaffected by mass dilation since they have no mass, but are affected by time dilation: a photon could conceivably travel "forever" from our point of view since no time would pass from a photon's reference frame. So yes, they follow the rules along with everything else.

Answer 2

No, because that would falsify the speed of light, now would it?

(alternate answer) Since a photon is a particle of light, then whatever speed it moves, is by definition the speed of light. Einstein has said that the speed of light, c, in a vacuum is always the same (approximately 300,000 km/sec). The speed of light when it is not in a vacuum appears to be different. Then the speed of light depends upon the medium through which the light is travelling. But even that is, in a sense, an illusion. If you were to watch a photon closely enough, on a microscopic scale, you would see that it is not travelling in a straight line, when it passes through glass and apparently slows down. Actually, it is still travelling at exactly the same speed, but it is taking a complicated course around the atoms in the glass, which lengthens its path and causes it to take longer to pass through the glass than it would take to pass though an equivalent thickness of vacuum (or even of air). But photons always travel at the speed c. Under some circumstances, they can be made to appear to be travelling slower than that.

Answer 3

There is nothing, including photons, that we know of that can travel faster then the speed of light. It is the single fastest known thing in our universe.

Answer 4

Yes.

When a photon is emitted it behaves like a EM wave. It does not need to be accelerated but will instantly have the speed of light.