Thread: "Time Travel"
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Old 11-30-2008, 10:43 AM   #7
devonin
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Default Re: "Time Travel"

I'm not sure what you're building a window out of that holds up in vacuum at a velocity faster than the speed of lgith, but there would be plenty of light on all sides of you, just not the same light that you'd see if you were stationary.

You won't be able to tell what you're looking at in the same way that just driving very fast at normal Earth speeds starts to create tunnel vision and blur what you can see around you.

Also...the important thing you seem to be missing in the OP is that light is not the same thing as images. Moving away from the Earth extremely fast until you've "passed" the light that is a million years old is something you can do in theory, except what you're really doing is moving away from the -sun- extremely fast until you've passed the light that is a million years old, and so you'd be able to see, um...some light that is technically old.

If you focused your super powerful, incredibly accurate telescope back at Earth and looked at it, you'd get -A clear image of Earth right now exactly as you left it- (Or potentially a few seconds after you left it depending I suppose on how long it took you to travel that far away.

What you're suggesting is somewhat analogous to saying "If I follow a river really far down from the lake, and then look at the water, can I see the lake"

Yes, it took the light emitted from say, some star far away, so long to get here that it may have already gone nova and we don't know because the light from the explosion hasn't reached us, but if you were to travel there at many times the speed of light, it would have still already gone nova, just as you approached it, you'd see the star's development accellerating because you were catching up to the light it was emitting right now.

Going really fast doesn't actually turn time backwards for everyone but you, as much as some bad sci-fi would have you believe. The best you can do in terms of going faster than light is to use it to functionally time travel into the future.
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