(December 22, 2011 at 3:47 pm)Darwinning Wrote: Imagine the speed of light does depend on the observer. What would someone sitting on a distant star gazing at Earth see? Light from Earth arrives at the alien observer instantly, so he'll see us typing; but light from the star is moving at half light speed, so has not yet reached Earth at all from his perspective.
So he's seeing our Earth, but one where we have never seen the stars (remember light from us to him is instant, so he is not seeing some distant past where his starlight has not yet reached him, it has to be Earth now but without starlight).
Ding! Paralel universe created.
But remember, it's only a different way of measuring things. Right?
It wouldn't even need to be an alien - we could perform the same measurements between two humans - one on the earth and the other on the moon or the international space station.
Does it go half-speed back and forth or instantaneously back and forth?
The problem with ASC is that the time corresponded to relativity's light-speed predictions easily visiible in the time-delays between communications between the lunar landers and Earth in the 60s and 70s Apollo missions.
Then there's the wierd thing about whether our robot probes count as observers or not and of course why time and space bends around us humans and/or other living things but not, say, our voyager space probe?
Are we of possession of psychic powers that bend and contort space and time uniquly to us that affects everything out to the end of space and time instantaneously? I can't even begin to say how many laws of physics that would break - mostly along the lines of the impossibility of energy being able to instantaneously travel anywhere - even within the confines of our solar system - let alone hundreds, thousands, millions, or billions of light years distant.
Then there's the biological implications - why are humans unique in this ability and where do these space-and-time-altering abilities come from? Jesus? God? The Soul? Conciousness?
If so, then why would this benefit people of other faiths? What about the entirety of humanity prior to christianity (which hasn't been a thing until the last century and the forerunner of all the constituant christian faiths until a mere few thousand years ago). Were all the stars more than a few thousand light years distant prior to the birth of the Jewish faith invisible until light could propogate to the Earth?
What if the observer is an atheist or buddist or scientologist?
Why would these things matter at all especially considering that my religious conviction (or lack thereof) have no bearing on any other laws of physics except for the one that conveniently explailns why we're in a young universe?
If Jesus only does tihs for humanity as a whole, then why would this measure exactly as our wrong scientific predictions to our robotic space probes as well? Is Opportunity and plucky mars space rover a christian too? Did voyager get baptized before launch? Did the Kepler space telescope graduate from Baby Jesus University?
It's all mind-numbingly stupid and all it does is give some pseudo-scientifc BS explaination to handwave away the OVERWHELMING evidence for an exceedingly old universe.
If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools and next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers...
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925
Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. ~Ronald Reagan
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925
Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. ~Ronald Reagan