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74 Comments
- Smiley09, on 10/18/2007, -2/+37Isn't this basic science? or... no?
- inactive, on 10/17/2007, -2/+26Wow, no ***** sherlock. Thanks to digg, I don't need to go back to middle school science class.
- enjinere, on 10/17/2007, -0/+18Judging by some of the comments I've seen on evolutionary topics, a lot of people could use a review of basic science.
- Jugalator, on 10/17/2007, -1/+18Yes, even when looking at our Sun. That's the Sun 8 minutes ago. But really, this all feels like pretty basic science to me, especially for a place like Digg. :-/
- opticwind, on 11/02/2007, -0/+15Pics or it didn't happ...wait, sorry, I can just look up at the stars and see how it did.
On an intelligent (ha!) note, EVERYTHING you see is in the past. Light travels at around 1 foot per nanosecond. If something is a mile away, you see what it looked like 5,280 (I totally didn't wiki how far a mile is in feet) nanoseconds ago. Look at a mirror from 2 feet away and see how young you used to be 4 nanoseconds ago (gotta include 2 for the reflection distance). - Apokalyps2547, on 10/17/2007, -4/+18Pretty cool stuff. Every time we look at the stars we are looking directly into the distant past.
- DeskFlyer, on 10/17/2007, -3/+12Makes you wonder where the distant objects we see in the sky actually are now.....
- ckhw2, on 10/17/2007, -1/+10Why? Are you running Vista?
- empraptor, on 10/17/2007, -1/+9And when you look at your computer monitor you're looking into the immediate past.
- Jugalator, on 10/17/2007, -0/+6And things get really funny when one start thinking about what light is doing at durations shorter than the Planck time, around 1*10^-44 seconds. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_time )
Is time not flowing, but quantized after all? Do time tick forward like a clock? It will be hard to know for a long time, as we are way behind the tech needed to measure these short durations. - bcasper1, on 10/17/2007, -0/+6if light traveling away from a distant star, when viewed eventually by our eyes is actually seeing that star in the past because it takes so many light years to get from there to us, then theoretically the light bouncing off of the earth from the sun, which makes all things from our point of view on earth visible, would broadcast the human history into space when viewed in sequence from a distant sun. So if we could travel faster then the speed of light and "catch up" to our stream of light or history we could then theoretically travel back in time without interfering physically with it. cool, just a thought.
- inactive, on 10/17/2007, -1/+7So I guess you could say that we're never actually looking at something at the moment, but continuously looking back in time.
- Nidy1, on 10/17/2007, -1/+5They're behind you!
- probrian, on 10/17/2007, -0/+3windows ME
- Zoshchenko, on 10/17/2007, -1/+4We tend to think of time as being just as finite as everything else around us. As humans we find it next to impossible to imagine either infinity or zero, because neither of these are a part of our everyday world. Time seems to constantly be moving forward at the same speed, but once you leave the confines of our narrow existence, even that ceases to be true. Put the baseball game on TV and forget about it.
- SlappyMc, on 10/17/2007, -1/+4Thats what I was thinking..
- HunterTV, on 10/17/2007, -0/+3Well, this is true everywhere. Technically when you look at the monitor right in front of you you're looking at it as "it was" a very small fraction of time ago, not how "it is" at the moment. The brain isn't wired to perceive those small amounts of time, but they still exist.
- jaywalker, on 10/17/2007, -0/+2@ phenolholic
'what ifs' are what made science what it is today and your type of narrow mindedness is what kept it from being what it could have been... - phenolholic, on 10/17/2007, -0/+2at that scale, the idea of space and time interweaves, just as matter and energy, and particles and waves. so does cause and causality. hence our need to quantize, our ability to observe the observables by indexes. however, multiple dimensions of time, as multiple dimensions of space, is an area ignored by our inability to realize the consequence of time.
- noahhoward, on 10/17/2007, -1/+3Eventually we're going to get to a point where the universe is so complicated we'll have to invent some sort of god to make it easier on us.
- inactive, on 10/23/2007, -1/+3Planck time is the difference between one frame and the next in the matrix supercomputer.
- bigthink, on 10/17/2007, -0/+2This article is well-written, even interesting...but for me it isn't anything I didn't already know. And then a sad thought occurs to me as read the first two comments here...for many folks, this isn't common knowledge. It's kind of a sad commentary on the state of our science education system. Sorry if I'm coming off as arrogant...I'm not some super-educated science geek or anything...but this article really does seem to state some basic, obvious concepts.
- phenolholic, on 10/17/2007, -1/+3*****, all that time i spent doing trying to be an exemplerary student just so it can resurface on odd years later as a geek on digg, when i could've been getting laid at that tender age, improved my social interactions throughout adolescence/early-adulthood, and probably be out today getting laid today. time is a *****.
- Osjpr, on 10/23/2007, -0/+2This story is brought to you by Captain Obvious.
- phenolholic, on 10/17/2007, -0/+1it does exist, just a billion years ago.
- smek2, on 10/20/2007, -1/+2Yeah, i know that since childhood. That's pretty old news.
- inactive, on 10/17/2007, -0/+1It was a joke, man.
- Error601, on 10/17/2007, -0/+1You could take that one step further in that everything you sense is history. It takes time for stimulus to travel over nerves and then processed in the brain.
- inactive, on 10/17/2007, -0/+1You'd have to travel faster than light, unless you found a wormhole or something that just happened to go the right distance away.
- BlackiceNoku, on 11/02/2007, -0/+1lol, i knew this when i was like.....11
- ckhw2, on 10/17/2007, -0/+1Probably on the other side of the earth... Remember that the earth is spinning... The star need not even be in that general direction.
- phenolholic, on 10/17/2007, -0/+1i thought this was common knowledge. hence the concept of light years, the amount of time it takes the incident light to travel 1 year in a vacuum. and no you're not looking into the history, it's all relativity. a smaller, but more close to earth (although it vaguely uses the postulates of relativity) is living in the east coast, and talking to someone in the west coast. are they 3 hours in the past? personally, i think light having the particle/wave duality, or matter/energy duality, is far more interesting.
- inactive, on 10/17/2007, -1/+2By the way to the one that made comments concerning the east coast verse the west coast and looking 3 hours in the passed. In a sense you are. For they have concluded their task for the day during that range of time, what you are presently trying to conclude in your remaining 3 hours. In a since you are in the future and they are in the past and the cycle continues when they wake and when you are still asleep. You can also say; when you spin a top on earth and it is rapidly turning does that action slow time for the one that spun the top? Is the top many days ahead of the present? No. Perspective tells us that we are in the same gravitational rotation on earth so time is relevant, until we can escape earths gravitational influences, say; the speed of light. I guess to put it simply, time in space is infinite and is void of time as we know it. Our only relevance to time is our own calendar based on the rotation of the earth.
- inactive, on 10/17/2007, -0/+1Hey, the speed of light being constant, thus allowing us to determine the age of the universe, is just a theory. Granted, it's Einstein's freakin Theory of Relativity, but it's still just a theory.
- devzer0, on 10/18/2007, -1/+2OMFG -- what if it's not there anymore?! And we just don't know, yet ... =:-O
- Ngai, on 10/17/2007, -1/+2Sometimes I think the universe is actually a giant memory base....
farther away from now is the most advanced civilizations
34 billion light-years ahead of us....
Do you think it is possible for a painting to exist without artist? - inactive, on 10/17/2007, -0/+1Um, if faster-than-light travel were possible, we could just travel back in time here on Earth. Well, I mean, other than having to travel a certain distance out and a certain distance back, but technically, I believe the theory of relativity is such that if you go faster than light, you go back in time.
- inactive, on 10/17/2007, -0/+1No, you're thinking of near-light travel. As your speed increases, time dilation kicks in, making time appear to slow down for you and thus essentially getting you to the future faster. However, if you could break the light barrier, which is physically impossible so I don't even know why I bring this up, but IF you were to go FASTER than light, not just ALMOST the speed of light, you would in fact go back in time, as summed up by this nice limerick.
There was a young lady called Bright
Who could travel much faster than light;
She went out one day,
In a relative way,
And came back the previous night. - mountaincable, on 10/18/2007, -0/+1Time is relative, how distant is this past?
- AmericanJackass, on 10/22/2007, -0/+1Ummmm....
No ***** sherlock? Who diggs this crap? - rompom7, on 10/17/2007, -0/+1Even when looking at anything. There is a point in time somewhere between photons reflecting off a surface, and, the same photons hitting the receptor cells at the back of your eye.
- Scynet, on 10/17/2007, -0/+1Everything we know is a theory, every single piece of knowledge we have ever obtained. We just have to accept some theories as facts because our society wouldn't work well otherwise. "Dear jury and judge, I did NOT shoot this guy. The security camera was merely picking up light particles from various sources that happened to come together and resemble my image..." or "He isn't dead, he's standing right beside me! Everyone else is just suffering of a temporary mental condition which makes them think otherwise..."
- Fragnarg, on 10/17/2007, -0/+1yeah but nothing can go the speed of light unless in a vacuum, and there is no such thing as a prefect vacuum.
- engrishGamer, on 10/17/2007, -0/+1stuff like this is interesting but...I mean, everyone should already know that everything we see in space is from the past, because of their distances and the speed of light
- kurejibitch, on 10/17/2007, -1/+2...theoretically, what would we see if we could took a gigantic super-high-powered telescope billions of lightyears away and point it at Earth? What if we could get the telescope just far enough away to view certain time periods -- when meteors first struck, when the dinosaurs were wiped out, mankind's greatest wars..
Theoretically, I guess, light wouldn't leave the planet like that and we couldn't see it and we could never make a telescope that powerful and we'd die before we got far enough away and blah blah blah. But it poses some very interesting questions about how humans relate to time and just how subjective it is. Now isn't now for everyone else -- not even on the atomic level. It's all in how YOU see it.
Weird. I need to get stoned and print this out. - CosmicJustice, on 10/17/2007, -0/+1The oldest galaxies are 13 billion light years away.
All of the matter in the universe originated from a singularity in the big bang
Nothing can travel faster than light.
If the universe is 13 billion years old then how can any matter be even close to 13 billion light years away from the point of origin. - o0joshua0o, on 10/17/2007, -0/+1But where is your mind? Is it a product of itself?
- Ice9NC, on 10/17/2007, -0/+1I have read that space is curved and if you follow a path blindly on a straight line you will eventually end up where you started. I wonder how many of those points of lights out there are actually us.
- Teaboy, on 10/17/2007, -0/+1Anyone who knows about basic science knows it's not so good to look at the Sun :D
- jongos, on 10/17/2007, -0/+1Dugg for having one of the most accurate titles ever.
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