Nothing is faster than light - really?

So pretty much everybody agrees nothing can travel at the speed of light let alone exceed it.

However does sight not?

I open my eyes and can see stars from billions of light years away instantly. Now i understand that that light has been travelling that long and i am seeing where it was, that long ago but can you appreciate what I am trying to explain/ ask?

When you open your eyes you instantly see everything from the close to almost infinitely far away with no lag from distant objects.

This might just be sophistry but it's something i have occasionally pondered for years.

a reply to: johnb

"Nothing travels faster than light" is just our current belief.

Like we once believed the Earth was flat.

Or that we were the center of the Universe.

Of that we would never leave the ground.

Things change and we will someday travel faster than light, or at least find a way to warp the space-time to go from A to B almost instantly.

In-topic now: my understanding is that our sight goes along with the light speed. We can't "see" further than light.

Quantum entanglement is faster than light and has already been used in communications.

a reply to: johnb

When you open your eyes, the only reason you can see anything is because light is bouncing off of objects into them and on to your retina. If the light doesn't reach your eye, you don't see it.

a reply to: johnb

Quantum entanglement experimental results blew away the theory that nothing is faster than light. I've always looked at that 'barrier' as artificial and much like the old "nothing can travel faster than the speed of sound".

When we finally realize how ignorant we are we will stop makin these "Nothing is/can" claims.

a reply to: johnb

When you open your eyes you instantly see everything from the close to almost infinitely far away with no lag from distant objects.

sight is a function and the speed it takes to process information can be measured but not sight, it doesn't go anywhere, its the light coming to you that you see and then process into ........whatever you are looking at.

a reply to: johnb

The universe is expanding faster than light in the sense that the medium it travels trough (space) stretches.

Someone correct me if this is a misunderstanding.

originally posted by: luthier
Quantum entanglement is faster than light and has already been used in communications.

Link?

And the light coming into your eyes from a star a million light years away left the star a million years ago.

originally posted by: johnb

When you open your eyes you instantly see everything from the close to almost infinitely far away with no lag from distant objects. .

When you open your eyes you do not "instantly" see anything. There is a lag between when the light hits your eye and when your brain registers the occurence. The light must be converted to electrical impulse by the rear eye parts, the electrical impulse must be transmitted up the optic nerve to the brain, and than the brain must decode the electrical impulse. This all takes measurable time and is not instantaneous. To the human time scale it might seem instantaneous but it is not.

Also quantum entanglement does not imply that something is moving faster than light. The information may be travelling on a different dimensional level and where there is no distance between the two entangled objects... or something like that.

originally posted by: johnb
When you open your eyes you instantly see everything from the close to almost infinitely far away with no lag from distant objects.

It's just the way your brain processes it. The lag is still there, but your brain doesn't know how to work with it. Under the influence of certain chemicals, you can see how your ancient brain processes distance as time. I suppose it's so you can see a predator coming from a distance and fairly instantly calculate how long it will take for the predator to get to you, and how long you have to make an escape.

To do this, your brain divides what you're seeing up into fairly flat levels at certain distances away. It's because your eyes and brain don't know how to process time as a dimension because it's seeing it at a zero degree angle. Like trying to figure out how long a piece of string is if all you see it one end of it. So your brain divides up the world into objects it can see at different distances. Your hands. The keyboard. The window. Outside the window. The trees on the street... and so on until we get to the night sky, where your brain sees it as a distant flat surface with sparkly lights on it.

Our existence consists of lags. Even holding up my hand and looking at it, there is a slight lag between the time the reflected light hits it and my eye gathers the photons. Then there is an additional lag as my brain processes it to determine where and what it is, and whether or not I should act on it. So we're already detached from real reality by that amount of time. When you start to deal with greater distances, the lag becomes longer. But your brain puts it all together and calls it "now." Pretty tricky, really.

I would like to have somebody cook up a simulation of what the night sky would look like if you actually did see it in real time. Where the stars are in their real positions -- "right now" from my perspective -- rather than what they looked like hundreds or millions of years ago. Could be very interesting.

a reply to: johnb


When you open your eyes and see stars, you're seeing light that's traveled to you..

Your 'vision' didn't travel anywhere.

originally posted by: verschickter
a reply to: johnb

The universe is expanding faster than light in the sense that the medium it travels trough (space) stretches.

Someone correct me if this is a misunderstanding.

Yes you are right. I love pondering expansion.

There is light outside of our observable universe traveling towards us at the speed of light, yet being dragged away from us by the expansion of the universe. Our horizon expands fast enough that sometimes it catches up to this light (which is confusingly traveling both towards and away from us) and that's why things on the far edge of our universe are red-shifted (the doppler effect). The light is stretched.

I suggest absolutely everyone watch this video, it is so incredibly fascinating. It explains about our observable universe's horizon (Hubble Sphere) expanding and how we can sometimes see things further beyond our horizon. It puts a lot of these ideas in perspective in just 5 minutes and it is very understandable.

a reply to: johnb

OK...so you are seeing old light. It's possible that one of those stars upon which you are fixing your gaze blew up 10,000 years ago. But you won't know about it for another 10,000 years.

Your sight is NOT faster than light.

a reply to: DanDanDat

Well now we have a definition problem.

Like time. Time is not age.

So sure entanglement does not travel in the sense of point A to B like an arrow.

However practically speaking it's 100k times faster than light in terms of clocking.


Just like long distance space travel would most likely not occur by going faster than light. As in negative matter concepts.


dailynexus.com...

Some interesting research.

Thought, in other realms, is faster.

a reply to: johnb

What ever you look at is light from the past..

The light is constantly beaming of everything.. and you are just seeing the light that is hitting you at the the time.
The object you are seeing are in another timeline.. and the closer you get to the object the more in real time picture you get.

a reply to: johnb

The only reason you have sight at all is because of light and the speed it can move.

There is no such thing as physical moving sight particles.

What you see is based off the information that light is bringing to your eye.

a reply to: luthier

Not faster because QE has no movement.

Imagine.. light as water..

And I get a water hose and spray you in the face from 100 meters distance..
The water is hitting your face, and boom when you open your eyes you see the water instantly.
The water you are seeing are the "old" water that first came out of the hose when I turned it on