After watching the Into The Universe With Stephen Hawking special on Discovery (first aired on 4/25/2010) about Time Travel, it got me to thinking about time again with some additional understanding. If you haven’t you might want to read my previous post on this.
In my previous post I talked about a guy traveling around the Earth in a really fast space ship. This is the same as the show’s example of people going around the Earth in a really fast train where time slows down for them. What I realized is that while we would indeed continue to see them going around the Earth, we would see them going around for 50 years or whatever. However, to the guy in the space ship or the people in the train, they would have only been going around for a week. They would have only eaten seven bowls of cereal for breakfast and so on. They have therefore traveled into the future.. or, more precisely, our future at much faster rate than we did.
I would suspect that if there was a camera inside the train showing what the crew was doing, it would appear to us that they were not moving or doing anything. One of them blinking would take a day to complete (I’m guessing here but you get the idea).
Once again the show proved that what Superman did would have actually caused him to travel into the future, not the past. It seems that while you might be able to travel into the future at a much faster rate, you still can’t go back in time. Stephen Hawking’s experiment to leave a message for some scientist of the future to meet him at such and such place at such and such time to prove time travel to the past is possible demonstrates that it never became possible because no one showed up. However, there is a kind of way that you can travel into the past or at least observe what the past was like.
When you look into space, you are seeing how things used to be, not how they are due to the amount of time it takes light to travel through space. When you look at the sun, you see how the sun appeared and where it was physically 8 minutes ago, roughly. If you got into a space ship and traveled 1,000 light years away and looked back at the Earth with a telescope, you would see what was happening on Earth 1,000 years ago because it would have taken 1,000 years for the light coming from Earth to reach your telescope. Well, for this to work you would have to calculate where the Earth was physically located within space 1,000 years ago and go to a spot 1,000 light years away from that point to see the photons and whatever other electromagnetic energy left the Earth at that time.
Well, before my brain explodes or something, I’m going to go ahead and post this. I need to put some clothes in the dryer anyway LOL. 🙂