RE: The universe appears "old", but it is still less than 10,000 years old
February 19, 2014 at 9:17 am
(This post was last modified: February 19, 2014 at 9:27 am by Alex K.)
(February 19, 2014 at 9:13 am)Zen Badger Wrote:(February 19, 2014 at 9:07 am)Alex K Wrote: Well, all I can say is what I say above
The trouble with special relativity is that for two events in spacetime which are too far apart to be connected causally, there is no unique notion of which happened before or after the other. In standard SRT synchronization, it depends only on the relative speed of the observer (not on relative position) which of the two events happens first. This ambiguity in temporal order of causally disconnected events can be exploited to further drop the shared timeframe which is usually assumed at least for observers at rest to each other.
To summarize the whole thing: if you strip away the mathematical shenanigans, what Waldorf wants us to do is the following: you observe light from Andromeda tonight - let's call the moment in time on Andromeda when it left there "now" rather than "3 million years ago", and act as if no further time had passed on Andromeda after the departure of this light - this is in principle a completely skewed, but consistent way to view the world because nothing that happened after that on Andromeda is causally connected to us yet.
I understand all of that.
But that is simply a case of perception. It's doesn't mean that it is what is actually happening.
And it doesn't mean that the light from Andromeda got here instantly.
It still took it 2.2 million years to complete the journey, no matter how we wish to view it.
There is no concept of "what is actually happening" with any grounding in evidence beyond what is expressed by our scientific models. It seems to me like you desperately want to remain in a baroque era intuition of reality onto which all the new stuff is just grafted on, but with an actual absolute space and time and deterministic reality lurking beneath Relativity and Quantum Theory. That's not how it is, if you want to say "it took 2.2 million years", you have to put a little imaginary footnote which specifies within which theoretical framework and for which observer this statement is to be interpreted. This is already the case without nonisotropic synchronization nonsense: in general relativity, someone sitting on the surface of jupiter will measure a different time passing than someone floating in space. This difference will be rather minuscule, but that's not the point.
