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If I was to look up, would I be looking at light from the past? If i was to travel there and look at earth would i be looking in the past?
Sort of like a paradox question that questions the perception of time. Every human interpenetrates time differently but measures it the same around the world. We use the Gregorian Calender and it is widely excepted that there are 365 days in a year and 24 hours in a day and so on. If I was to look up I would be looking into the past because it takes so long for light to reach earth. So if i was to look at earth from a far star or planet, would i be looking into the past? And yes it does make it a different question depending on how fast you travel to that far star or planet.
Random Chance 30+
since it really doesn't exist, there is no way much could be known about it.
Everything is happening all at once, right now, right this moment, every where in the universe...
and there is enough room for it all.
I have a tag on question to the topic.
Is the human eye capable of (or does it actually do this?) 'see' light out in space as opposed to thinking one is seeing it here "at earth"?
Some telescopes see light that is actually billions of years or light years out in space. It hasn't actually reached earth yet, or the human eye, so how far into space can the human eye see light?
Hope that was ok to do. I know it's all a contradiction
Jon Ho
You sir, knows more about time than you think you do, every time you look at your clock to see the seconds ticking away, the minutes advancing step by step, and the hours slowly, ever slowly, dance to the tune of the universe.
Don't forget, you have a Past, Present, and Future. But! For alien civilization, your Past is their Future, and your Future is their Past, tesseracting at will. However to say that time is a tesseract is an understatement; it's simply much more than that because a tesseract is linear while time is non linear.
Ian Sheane
Rick Ryan 10+
I think it would be more accurate to say that everyone is born with the ability to perceive time, but insofar as perceptions can be "tricked" or misleading, one person's "version" (perception) of "time" could be different than another person's. And one person's perception of time will not even be consistent to themself depending on the circumstances. So even a "Universal Time" could be perceived differently by different people.
Imagine two separate events that actually take the same amount of time...let's say 1 hour...to complete. If I as an individual am engaged in an activity I enjoy, time can seem to "fly" by much quicker than I would have liked it to..."Wow! That was fun, but it ended much too soon!" But if I was engaged in a different activity that was "boring" to me, the opposite could occur..."Geez! That seemed that it took forever!" Both "times" were the same 1 hour.
Now, imagine 2 different people engaged in the SAME activity for the SAME 1 hour. One is enjoying it, and one is bored. One of them is going to "feel" time passed quickly, while the other could feel it just dragged on and on and on.
Kind of like a husband and a wife on her shopping trip for clothes:
Husband: "Sweetheart, are we done yet?"
Wife: "Almost dear. I only have 3 more items to try on."
Husband (quietly to himself): "Somebody please shoot me to end this."
Yes, the above example is tongue-in-cheek, but what if the husband was able to watch his favorite football team playing a game on a TV screen hung on a wall outside the changing room his wife was in? Would he possibly have a different "perspective" on the passage of the time?
Gail . 50+
You might enjoy the movie "Young Einstein". Funny and educational.
edward long 100+
Rick Ryan 10+
Each observer would see their OWN "present" right next to them, but the "past" of the other observer because of the time it takes the "present" light from each observer to travel to the other observer. Each observer would currently be seeing the other's "past light" that left the planet the other observer was on in the other observer's "past".
Are you asking if you could theoretically see your OWN past if you managed to travel away from your own planet faster than the speed of light?
Ian Sheane
Gail . 50+
At the same time, there is gravity that affects time. Take a sky scraper. Those on the bottom floor experience time differently than those on the top.
But, commerce is well-served by a universal time construct. Time zones, for instance, were "invented" when the railroad companies need to create their time schedules. They are a very recent thing. Time is not as important for many other cultures.
Gail . 50+
At the same time, there is gravity that affects time. Take a sky scraper. Those on the bottom floor experience time differently than those on the top.
But, commerce is well-served by a universal time construct. Time zones, for instance, were "invented" when the railroad companies needed to create their time schedules. They are a very recent thing. When we began to move faster, the need for a common time understanding became important. Time is not as important for many other cultures.
Jon Ho
Except... and this is where it gets tricky, that time can bend due to gravity, due to Gravitational Time Dilation. Which you so conveniently explained. ;)
Gail . 50+
If a spaceman had been part of a community that had been traveling at tremendous speeds for generations, then that community will be living in a much younger universe than you are, so your lunch date was relative to your position.
Ian Sheane
Jon Ho
And again, I agree about the second part, time IS space, space IS time. However... If a spaceman had been part of a community that had been traveling at tremendous speeds for generations, that community is STILL living in the SAME UNIVERSE. Only difference is due to TIME DILATION, they suffer(?) the effects of time slower.
Gail . 50+
Prior to the big expansion, all times probably existed IN THEIR POTENTIALS in an infinite moment of now., just as yours do. They only became realized (KNOWABLE) with the appearance of SpaceTime.
As to measuring light: Someone, at some time, established a system of measurement. In the US, it's based on a foot. In the UK, it's based on a meter.
Light travels at 186,282 miles per second or about 700 million miles per hour. It can also said to travel at 299,792,458 meters per hour. This is true for all light in our reality. However, it turns out the light's speed is farster, the farther away from its source it becomes. (an interesting factoid)
We dont just measure light from our star. We measure light from the furthest reaches of the heavens. The diameter of the observable universe is 93 billion light years or 8.80×1026 metres. But remember, ours is probably not the only universe. It is more likely that we are more like 2 dimensional beings living in a 3 or more dimensional reality. Shouldn't this impact your notion of time?
Little is known about time. I conceive of it as a multi-layered grid like framework and I navigate the grid like a ship captain navigates the oceans. But that is MY theory.
Jon Ho
Well, maybe, if we are all still in the singularity, then yeah, I agree with you everything you said, that everything, past, present, and future, is NOW.
After the Big Bang though, and with the introduction of Space-Time(TM), to say that everything happen in the NOW, the idea that all is one, with no thought of cause and effect, is well, just wrong. Why? Because what you are proposing is exactly what my friend Zeno proposed a couple of millenium ago. Check out "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno's_paradoxes"
I LOVE your theory of time! Brilliant! Let me add more to it. Instead of just the oceans, try adding canals, rivers, lakes, whirlpool and eddies in the water, and rivers that bend back towards itself. ;)
Gail . 50+
Because when you split the photon in half, they had opposing spins. When one photon got to a point 14 miles away from the other (though it could have been across the universe), the spin of one was changed and the other SIMULTANEOUSLY (in no time) changed its spin accordingly. How did the information get from one to the other in zero time? It could only be if the separation was an illusion or if 2 photons exist in one dimension and a third in the next - which exists in a reality that does not have time. (Recently proved at CERN). (1+1=3+ in the quantum world)
Well, using this principle, let's say that the entire potential universe existed as a singularity, but it suddenly split apart. In this analogy, then we are ALL one in at least one other dimension. From the position of the ultimate relationship, there is only one moment. It is "NOW", which is how information is transferred across the multiverse in zero time.
Thus, the only uniform time that is true for ALL observers in any situation is NOW.
Gail . 50+
Jon Ho
If I was them aliens I would have returned the child at the exact moment the child boarded my ship in curiosity because:
1) Travelling at 80% speed of light is extremely inefficient; I would be 90,000 years old if I were to go back to Alpha Centauri and
2) Any aliens worth his salt would travel not just through Space but through Time as well. ;)
Gail . 50+
:-)
Jon Ho
but...
People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually, from a non-linear non-subjective viewpoint, it's more like a big bowl of wibbly wobbly timey wimey... stuff. ;)