Can you witness two states of time?

Question

If you glanced to your left, surely your left eye would receive an image before your right eye. So, the image in your right would be for arguments sake 0.0000000000001 secs older than the image your left is receiving.

Answer 1

Actually it would be a longer separation than that. You got carried away with the zeros. If your eyes are separated by 10cm, and you are looking at something say, 45 degrees off of straight ahead, then the light travel distance will be 7cm further to one eye than the other. Divide that by the speed of light and you end up with about 0.2ns difference. (0.0000000002s).

Sadly, our human brains take about 30th to a 20th of second (.03 to .04) seconds to build an image, depending on the individual and your adrenalin level. This is why 24 (26?) frames per second in a movie looks pretty continuous to our minds. This is sooo much longer than that light travel time distance (about a 100 million times longer or so) that you will never percieve a lag though it is fun to think that yes, the photons are hitting your cones and in one eye a tad sooner.

Gravitational lenses do enable us to see multiple images of the same object at different times since the resulting light paths from the object to earth usually have different lengths. Sometimes miages gravitationally lensed objects have been identified as belonging to the same object by observing luminosity fluctuations in one image that are then repeated in another image hours to days later. Of course, this is done with telescopes and digital cameras, not eyeballs, but in principle I suppose you could image both images at the same time and use some sort of binocular device to superimpose them in your field of view in different eyes.

I say in principle because you would need a VERY large telescope to dump enough light from a quasar into your pupil to see it with your brain.

In that case you WOULD be seeing the same object at two different points in its history simultaneously from your perspective.

Answer 2

Your left and right eye are different angles of what you see, the two eyes piece two images together to create a larger angle of what your seeing.
My answer is to your question similar to the answers others have gave, virtually your brain is recieving an older image than the right in your question.
Light also travels fast so this would effect virtually too.
To a round-up measurement light takes 182,600 cubed miles per second.
So if your head is positioned to the right then the left eye will recieve the image quicker than the right eye. Because the head is tilted so. It maybe 1 mili-meter but just a little difference effects.

Answer 3

Since the signal is received by the brain still must be interpreted, I don't know if you can say you are visualizing two different states in time.

Additionally, the response of the eye isn't instantaneous unlike the nerves. The rods and cones have to absorb the information and it's possible to have a different response from left to right.

Answer 4

This would only be so if the images of both of your eyes were read indipendantly by your brain.

This is not the case. THe brain takes an amount of time to amalgm the pictures and there for you'd never see the difference.

Answer 5

Yes just stare straight ahead. The further objects are away from you 'older' the image is. Just look at the night sky. You can see an infinite number of states of time, because of the time it takes the starlight to reach us. You can only see the sun as it was three minutes ago! Yet the clouds are close enough to be almost as they exist now.

Gr8 Q tho'

Answer 6

You cannot witness even one state of time, let alone two. If you look to your right only that portion of the universe is available to you, the left side will not exist because you would need your sense of sight to bring it into existance. Going futher the right side is of your existense. Movement, height, weight, space, it all exists in your mind. That which you see, is that what you want to see, not what is actually out there. If you were to actually see what is out there...then again, you cannot see the real, you must only understand it. Age does not exist out there, it a movie playing in your mind.

Answer 7

Ah, but it's the brain's INTERPRETATION of the nerve impulse that gives you the sensation of sight. And because you are not aware of having seen two states of time, your body must compensate for the minimal shift that would occur.

However, if you are dating a girl and go visit her mother, you are seeing what she will look like in twenty years. Does that count?

Answer 8

true, in theory. Look into the night sky, you are looking across tens of millions of years.

Answer 9

could a difference in thunder and lightning be viewrd as two different stats of time?

Answer 10

then and now