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2026-04-01 12:51:23 UTC
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Greg Egan on Nostr: What about lightlike geodesics? Do they converge, diverge, or remain equally spaced? ...

What about lightlike geodesics? Do they converge, diverge, or remain equally spaced? That’s tricky, because in 2D spacetime the only direction perpendicular to a lightlike geodesic is along the geodesic itself, so you can’t measure the separation along a perpendicular vector.

Here lightlike geodesics grow further apart, as measured along the grey circles. This is how the cosmological red shift works: wavefronts in an expanding universe move apart. But that’s a measurement by *particular observers*, at rest in galaxies that are themselves moving apart.