It Boggles the Mind
Here's an image that The Donald sent me of M104, the Sombrero Galaxy, taken by the Hubble Telescope. It has been voted by our astronauts as the best image acquired by Hubble. I would not disagree.
Now the light from the 800 billion suns that resulted in this image left the Sombrero Galaxy 28 million years ago, some 25 million years before the critters here on earth that ultimately became homo sapiens began walking on two feet.
So what does the Sombrero Galaxy look like today, January 24, 2007? Well, the earliest folks here on earth could know is 28 million years from now. In other words, what's going on in the Sombrero Galaxy at the present moment is unknowable and will always remain so for 28 million years.
Now as we get closer to objects, this lag of the unknown becomes increasing shorter. For our own sun, this knowledge lag is 8.317 seconds. For the moon, it's even smaller. Yet, when the astronauts on the moon spoke with Houston, this knowledge lag was discernable in the delay between a question being asked and the answer being recieved.
On a down-to-earth basis, the knowledge lag is seldom discernable. Yet, even two feet or two inches away, what is happening is unknowable to you at the exact instant it happens!
OK, that having been said, the force of gravitation between two objects acts instantaneously over all distances! The gravitation effects of those 800 billion suns in the Sombrero Galaxy on the earth, the pull of our own sun on the earth and the pull of the moon on the earth all require a zero time lag to respond.
The same is true for certain more esoteric quantum effects in physics, in which physical states change instantly over all distances.
This leads to an interesting conclusion that everything can happen at once but our knowledge of it will always lag.
If that be so, did everything happen that will ever happen at The Big Bang and we are just now catching up with it in our region of time and space? Is/Has everything that will ever happen already happened? Is what we will experience in the future already happened and we are simply predestined to experience it after a lag of a few billion years?
Or, alternatively, is The Big Bang simply the eldest event we have experienced and in our local space and time we have complete free will to do anything and everything in the present?
It boggles the mind!
Now the light from the 800 billion suns that resulted in this image left the Sombrero Galaxy 28 million years ago, some 25 million years before the critters here on earth that ultimately became homo sapiens began walking on two feet.
So what does the Sombrero Galaxy look like today, January 24, 2007? Well, the earliest folks here on earth could know is 28 million years from now. In other words, what's going on in the Sombrero Galaxy at the present moment is unknowable and will always remain so for 28 million years.
Now as we get closer to objects, this lag of the unknown becomes increasing shorter. For our own sun, this knowledge lag is 8.317 seconds. For the moon, it's even smaller. Yet, when the astronauts on the moon spoke with Houston, this knowledge lag was discernable in the delay between a question being asked and the answer being recieved.
On a down-to-earth basis, the knowledge lag is seldom discernable. Yet, even two feet or two inches away, what is happening is unknowable to you at the exact instant it happens!
OK, that having been said, the force of gravitation between two objects acts instantaneously over all distances! The gravitation effects of those 800 billion suns in the Sombrero Galaxy on the earth, the pull of our own sun on the earth and the pull of the moon on the earth all require a zero time lag to respond.
The same is true for certain more esoteric quantum effects in physics, in which physical states change instantly over all distances.
This leads to an interesting conclusion that everything can happen at once but our knowledge of it will always lag.
If that be so, did everything happen that will ever happen at The Big Bang and we are just now catching up with it in our region of time and space? Is/Has everything that will ever happen already happened? Is what we will experience in the future already happened and we are simply predestined to experience it after a lag of a few billion years?
Or, alternatively, is The Big Bang simply the eldest event we have experienced and in our local space and time we have complete free will to do anything and everything in the present?
It boggles the mind!
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