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Why the Universe is All History

Posted October 16, 2007 10:17 AM

From SPACE.com:

It took 300 years of experiment and calculation to pin down the speed at which light travels in a vacuum: an impressive 186,282 miles per second. Light will travel slightly slower than this through air, and some wild experiments have actually slowed light to a crawl and seemingly made it go backward, but at the scales encountered in our everyday lives, light is so fast that we perceive our surroundings in real time. Look up into the night sky and this illusion begins to falter. "Because light takes time to get here from there, the farther away 'there' is the further in the past light left there and so we see all objects at some time in the past," explains Floyd Stecker of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

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Guru

Join Date: Dec 2005
Location: Etats Unis
Posts: 1871
Good Answers: 45
#1

Re: Why the Universe is All History

10/17/2007 1:21 AM

Actually we only perceive at close to real time. There is about a 0.05 second delay just along the optic nerve. It may not seem like much but it is part of the reason you can disarm a person holding a weapon on you before they realize what's happened. It can also play a factor in certain other high speed events.

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Power-User

Join Date: Mar 2007
Posts: 158
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#2

Re: Why the Universe is All History

10/17/2007 6:06 AM

Just to make sure I have this right, this could be a means of measuring distances, if sent out into the reaches of space and targeted the lens, which would send back the same light to it's near point of origin, thus giving us a means to send a measured beam of light to a target, have it bent back upon itself or near self, and therefore a means of measuring the speed of light accurately and not theoretically, out to and beyond what we can see in the visual spectrum from any point in space, providing a reflected image of that interlining space, and thus providing a means to see into an image of that reflection?

That would mean if a smaller reflector was made and tractable, and or traceable you could intervene into sub molecular structures as well and thus be able to view an actual image of that interlining space as well ?

http://cr4.globalspec.com/blogentry/3602

And now according to this all we see is already past and thus a reflection of that time as we perceive it to be, leading to where we are in time and space at that moment of perception, that thus, measurable in time and space, we have already sent the light outward only to have it reflected back to us from out past?

And therefore spherical in nature, the limits of space the limited range of perceived light, yet we are only at the midpoint of that line, the center of the sphere of our perception and, therefore what we perceive is what we have ourselves sent out to perceive, from some other point on the space and time line even to a subatomic level?

joshua

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