A question about light speed/time

a reply to: crunchypeople
It would seem like your telescope or craft would have to have a time/light speed dial or space compressor?
That can be adjusted.

You then go out in your craft a certain distance say 5 times the speed of light and come back the same distance at 10 times the speed of light near EA*RTH or early SOL system.
Or collapse space into temporary compression points and await the unfolding or expansion.

Then adjusted your observation equipments.

You would probably need to generate a strong enough vortex that can pull all the photons associated in the region you seek to observe in the past back to points of their beginnings or original times emitted.
Or have a energy source that can compress time like a black hole at adjustable light speeds as you or observation equipment sit within it.

This vortex would be a wormhole or artificial black hole.

To get back to your original time & space you would need to travel back out at 20 times light speed same distance and then back 40 times light speed (feel free to check those numbers) which theoretically should get you back to original time line before you left.
Outside observers would probably see your craft or equipment blinking or phasing in and out of observable space in a short period of time...
If you have a machine that can pull space into a again wormhole like vortex then you theoretically can position your craft or observation equipments somewhere and not move at all and just move space around you at increased speeds of light.

The vortex of energy or worm hole is pulling the photons location of the planet in association to the Milky way in the past, as well is locating the Milky way photons at their location in the universe at those times.
1 could consider some star energy being required to assist somehow or power such hypothesized technologies.

NAMASTE*******

a reply to: sodero

Sweet, you're absolutely right.

So I guess for the person moving there is a natural progression where time potentially slows down to zero then starts going backwards.

For the person staying still tho, wouldn't time speed up to a point where it has to go backwards?

I've definitely got this wrong, I was thinking that both clocks run at a different speed however I guess the better way to look at it is, the stationary person's time stays the same and it's only the moving person that changes.

Of course the fact that this makes faster than light travel more plausible leaves me to believe I'm more wrong than I thought. Perhaps it's time to admit that Einstein "may" be smarter than me.

How can you see something that happened millions of years ago? It makes no sense.

"When it takes a picture of a galaxy 100 million light years away, we are seeing the galaxy as it looked 100 million years ago."

So if I take a picture of the starting line of a drag strip, from the finish line, I will see who? People that already raced? It makes no sense. They are lying.

And time moves faster the closer you get to the core. Even that retard Einstein says so. So how would you keep up, when the core of the universe is moving VASTLY faster than we are. Millennia have passed at the core since I started typing this.

This type of crap doesn't even fly in science fiction. The future has already happened at the core! How have they convinced the world of their Satanic baloney science? Taking a picture shows the past, the further away you are? No, light doesn't work that way. If it took a painting 100 million years, yeah, we'd see it undecayed. But light is not a static image. It is a dynamic experience. Its moving. Relativity. Duhhh. Its how the universe works. Things change with distance, and idiot science says all properties stay the same. Thats why the distance and the light years match.. Its an unbeatable system.

Trying to hard to be cleaver there AdKiller, that or purposely missing the point because you simply dont want to understand or dont want to learn. The effect is exactly the same as the propagation of sound being very slow.

The passage of light being finite speed, means you witness things as the light gets to your eyes and the signals converted such that your brain interprets them.

If you stand on an athletics course, and take picture of the start line at the moment you witnessed the gun (assuming it makes a flash rather than a bang) you are 100m away from the gun, the event of the gun firing, would of occurred 334ns BEFORE, you witnessed it.

Obviously such small time differences don't really affect our day to day life.

the sound analogy is quite obvious and if you have never witnessed it then... yeah try going outside a bit more? not sure what to advise.... school?

a reply to: crunchypeople
I'm glad that you ventured to ask your question, be it science fiction or not. I love thinking about things like this then trying to map out the possibilities. So for fun, speculatively speaking...encapsulated in a compressed warp drive...Wouldn't it create a sonic boom?

a reply to: AdKiller

1. I think you're greatly underestimating the size of space.

2. "Seeing" is passive. To "see" is to wait for light to reach our eyes, and then to wait for our brains to interpret that light.

3. To "see" a specific thing requires light to reach that specific thing, bounce off of that thing in a slightly altered pattern, and then reach our eyes (which then sends info to our brains, which then interprets that info).

4. The reason we're seeing into the past when we look deep into space is because the light from those objects takes a ridiculously long amount of time to reach our eyes. A "light year" is literally just the distance that light travels in a year.

5. Light can travel almost 5.9 trillion miles in a single year. That means that if we "see" an object in space that is 59 trillion miles away, it took the altered light that bounced off of that object more than 10 years to reach our eyes. That means we're only "seeing" the object as it was 10 years ago. We only seem to "see" Earthbound things as they happen because they're so close to us that the nanosecond delay doesn't even register with us (usually).

a reply to: crunchypeople

Thanks for the delightful OP, which involves at least three individually interesting questions: 1) Can a far-away telescope see what happens on earth? 2) Could we travel in a faster-than-light way and hence view history? 3) Are physicists "dicks"?

As a rough estimate to answer question 1, let's estimate that a 16 Watt light bulb is enough to illuminate and clearly see the details on a one meter radius sphere surrounding it and ask how many photons per meter squared there are at certain distances. Our 16 Watt bulb produces 16 J/s, or [16/(1.6e-19)] eV/s, = 1e20 eV/s. With each photon having an estimated 2 eV we see the bulb produces 5e19 photons per second. The density of photons gets diluted as the distance grows. At one meter from the bulb, we have [5e19 photons/s]/[4pi(1m)(1m)] ~ 4e18 photons per second per meter squared. Enough to see things quite well indeed! But consider how many photons there are by the time we get "just" one light-second away. That number falls by 3e8 squared - and we now have only 45 photons per second per meter squared. Not very many, even when collected over an area of a powerful telescope. By the time you get to "just" one light year away you have far too few photons to see anything at all, as the number of photons per square meter now drops by an additional factor of about 1e15. It would take roughly a million years to get one photon per square meter. So this tells us that we really won't be able to see much of the past in any detail, at least on the level of individual humans. The reason we can see stars is because of the enormous energy output they have. I will leave it as a homework exercise for others to estimate larger scale things like asteroid strikes or the formation of the moon. (Hint: those events will have much more than 16 W of output, but then again, they occurred a long time ago so the light sphere radius will also be much larger than one light-year.)

As for whether we can travel in a faster-than-light way, Einstein's special theory says no. The problem is that as you get closer to the speed of light (as observed by someone staying at rest) it is harder and harder to accelerate due to the intrinsic nature of space and time. Some general relativity concepts such as worm-holes and other odd things have been proposed, but I don't know if there is any real hard evidence for any of that nor am I expert on such matters. I do know that there is abundant evidence for the Lorentz force equation, and that the evidence agrees with Einstein's treatment. However, there are other treatments that also agree with the Lorentz force equation. If we return to the aether theories of Lorentz and others, then yes, you could travel in a faster-than-light way. I hope to post more about this if I ever get my aetherial Lorentz Force derivation done. The essential observation is this - Einstein's theories explain known effects as being caused by alterations of time and space as observed by observers in relative motion, while the classical theories explain the same effects as being caused by an absolute motion with respect to a physical aether. Hence, ala Einstein, nothing can be done about the situation since the effects are just a by-product of the intrinsic nature of space and time. But via the classical aether, the possibility is there to control the aether itself, since the aether is a material body, and this could lead to some rather wondrous things, one of which would be faster-than-light travel.

As for whether physicists are "dicks", well, that is rather subjective. One aspect involves those who know things versus those who seek knowledge. When we know things, we are sure, since knowledge is the acquisition of facts. And when we know, then we become superior in knowledge to those who don't know, and that can lead to arrogance and condescension (an apparent "dick"-like behavior) aimed at those who don't know what we do. On the other hand, when we seek knowledge it leaves us more humble (and less prone to "dick"-like behavior) since our quest inevitably involves stumbles and bumbles and failures along the way, and that leads to more empathy with and understanding of our fellow, frail, human brothers and sisters. Unfortunately, when you ask a question you'd usually like an answer, and you'd generally not want some philosophical ramblings about stumbling and bumbling from some "seeker of truth". And so, you seek advice from an "expert". Those experts must of course have some body of knowledge from which to give an answer, and hence if you ask questions about things that presume something contrary to their "known facts" then it can be an entirely proper response for such experts who "know" to dismiss the question as impossible and hence outside the realm of proper discussion. So imho its really not a matter of being a "dick" but rather one of being in the right forum. ATS is a pretty good place for such questions. The Physical Review, not so much.

Well, it was great to check back in here. I peruse the topics here regularly, and this OP was a pretty good one to chime in on. It's tax prep and proposal time for me now, but I hope soon to get back to my stumbling and bumbling and with any luck I might have some aetherial advances to pass on in the coming months.