Light reflections as a time machine?
 

I have a theory I am kicking around. We take pictures of far away stars and we are seeing them as they looked sometimes a million years ago because that is how long it took the light to get here. What if we can capture some light rays that have been bouncing around the solar system but are very old and will show us how Earth or Mars looked a million years ago or older. I am no rocket scientist but I do enjoy astronomy, is there any way this idea could work? Let me know if you have any more ideas or you are a scientist and if this sounds feasible.

Thanks,

Queedo
:confused:

Not feasible, unfortunately.

For starters, the solar system is mainly empty space. There's barely anything for the light to reflect off of, and that which would reflect would disperse in a way that would destroy any sort of image. And that's if you're lucky enough to get it to reflect once -- a million years of reflection isn't going to happen.

Is it possible for light to be suspended somplace?

Well, it's posible for light to travel in a loop by bending around stars and galaxies. Though there arn't any perfect mirrors or prisims floating around in space. So I cant see how we would ever make out any kind of image from the light particles that do manage to make it back to earth.

Excellent thinking, queedo.

Black holes may be the answer you are looking for - since all they do is suck up light and matter. It's a possibility, I assume (not a theoretical physicist or anything), that all of the light and matter that they have stored in their core is still there, just extremely compacted.

Extracting it may be another problem.

Oh and Mantus...who ever said we're going to be doing this from Earth? ;D

The light captured in a black hole would have lost all information that would create a relevant image, even if you could take it from the black hole to see what it looked like.

Take a cookie and compact it into a space the size of a pea. Then spread it back out on your counter. Betcha it won't look like a cookie anymore.

Such a mirror probably doesn't exist. If it did, it might be something like a large black hole in the middle of interstellar space that bends the light from earth 90 degrees to another black hole which bends it again. Voila, the light from earth going back to earth.

We couldn't go out into space and set up such a mirror, because we can't outrun light.

However, the light would end up being extremely extremely weak. So weak that it would probably be theoretically impossible to distingiush anything of any interest. A million light years is a long way to travel.

Your idea is strictly in principle, possible, but in practice it is entirely infeasible to actually achieve something like this, for the various reasons quoted above.

However, I do object to your claim that such an achievement were it ever to occur would consitute a time machine.
It would be a time machine no more than any record of information is a time machine: a photograph, an impact crator, a book, a fossil, etc.

It would me more of a time viewer. I only said time machine because at the time I couldn't think of anything better.:D

AFAIK, there's no reason you wouldn't be able to successfully extract things out of a black hole just as they went in. Given that since we have found said black hole, we have it's vortex pattern and everything, wouldn't we be able to kind of, stretch it back out and un-tworl it?

The lack of gravity is so powerful everything is crushed. Also, and correct me if I'm wrong, but if everything is sucked into the point of the singularity wouldn't it cease to exist?

tehblaed, black holes as far as mordern physics can tell, do not return information about what they ate, other than I think charge (maybe), rotation, mass and total enthropy (which might be bound by the other parameters).

They are the great information erasers in the sky.

Depending on their mass, they eventually evaporate (we think), but the energy/mass that exits them is very very unrelated to that which entered.

Mojo, any predictions about what goes on inside a black hole are untestable from outside a black hole, which makes discussing what happens to the matter that falls into them rather silly.

Currently, there are scientists/astronomers who are analyzing microwave background radiation that is said to be as old as the universe itself..

If I find the PopSci article, I'll letcha know. ;)

-SF

I suppose the same could be said of any mirror. Meaning that whenever you look in the bathroom mirror you're looking back in time - to an incredibly small extent.

Guy shaving - "Whoa, I can't believe I used to have a beard. What was I thinking?"

Very True

Well, My point is that the image/light has to be far enough away as to not reached us yet so we in fact looking at the past for the area we are looking at.
If we could get a camera to travel faster than the speed of light for long enough to be far enough away to veiw the earth before the light reached the area. The view would in theory be from our past?
Ken

you can't get a camera to go faster than the speed of light.

Not currently, but who knows what the future will bring?

Well, if we're allowed play THAT game, why not just stick a Flux Capacitor into the back of a delorean? :)

nah, too science fictiony, everyone knows all you need to do is zip around the sun to travel in time:cool:

Perhaps it will work that way someday, but if we doubt we will, it can never happen!

Hows this.....
Find a wormhole(yeah I know) Send a probe with an orientation program to find earth, and an incredibly powerful telescope. Take some movies of the forty million light year old earth. Take the wormhole back(yeah...I still know) and you have forty million year old home movies.

Why not just have the probe bury itself and we can dig it up latter?

To answer the original question,

Yes.

IF it were possible to get a BIG enough telescope FAR enough out into space, you would be looking at light from Earth that shows events in the past.

We can do the exact same thing with our planet. Just imagine 1000 light years away they are seeing the earth 1004AD

We would need a high powered telescope.

Then we would need to travel the 1000 light years distance. Now I have NO idea how to do this so lets say we can and we can instantly transport ourselves from Earth to this area.

Relative to the new area we are observing we will be looking at the earth 1000 years from Earth's past.

But you then have to go into the theory of Relativity and wonder what the past present and future is while you watch it.

Ok provided some day we can travel faster then light.

The inverse square law of radiation would mean we would need a REALLY big collector to see anything worth seeing.