I’ve been recently enthralled In Einstein’s work and I have been reading about space and time. Here is a simple yet elegant thought experiment, the same as Albert’s theory but with a modern twist. You are driving down the highway at 60mph let’s say that the speed of light is 70mph. what do you see when the car behind you and the car in front of you are both going 70? Well one would see the car on front of them has passed and continues moving ahead of you, much like how the light passes through an object and shines its reflection on the floor, it’s already passed. What about the car behind you? Well, you would see the light much later in time than the one that’s already passed. In theory, they both exist at the same time for someone observing the two cars from the side of the road. Albert asks: How could one event that happens at the same time be observed at different times for 2 people? He then realized that time is relative to the observer. My twist is this, let’s say for this experiment the same thing happens again, 2 cars, except, now you’re going 80mph. This is not possible according to Einstein but let’s pretend. For the car behind you, it would never reach you, as far as you’d ever be concerned, it would have never existed. The car in front of you would slowly pass until there are no more cars on the road to observe, eventually you will have passed every car possible on the highway until you’re the only one left to observe. Then what? Time would have appeared to be non existent because no events could ever be observed. Is the reason why light is the speed limit of existence only because light is time itself? and wouldn’t it be true that as you go faster than light, you start observing “cars” or events that have already happened? is this time travel? What a wonderful thought! We say “go back in time” but really, provided this is true, we would actually have to go faster than light to achieve going “back” in time.
What do you guys think?
When you look up into space, you're already seeing things that happened in the past because, as you know, the speed of light is finite, so it takes some time for those photons to reach your eye. "Recently", there was reported an explosion 'that occurred in the Ophiuchus cluster, which lies about 390 million light-years from Earth.' When we witness such an observation on Earth, we're really observing something that happened 390 million years ago (since it took 390 million years for the light/information to reach us.) Definitely fun thinking about these things. We're already living with 'lag' on a macro scale, but of course light travels fast enough on the micro-scale so that what we see around us in our normal lives is being processed pretty much instantly.