Was it time travel?

Question

A while ago I was watching TV (I can't for the life of me remember what I was watching, though) and they were talking to scientists.

The scientists explained that they can never know what caused the Big Bang because the farthest back their cameras could record was a billionth of a second after.

But in saying that, doesn't it mean that they found out a way to send video cameras back in time? If not, how is it possible to record the aftermath of the Big Bang?

Answer 1

light has a finite speed so we see things, everything, as they were. light needs about eight minutes to get from the sun to the earth so we see the sun as it was eight minutes ago. the farther away something is the longer it takes for light to get here.

about 380 000 years after the big bang, the universe had cooled enough for electrons and atomic nuclei to combine and form atoms. this enabled light to pass freely, and the universe became transparent.

we see this light today as the cosmic background radiation because the expansion of the universe has stretched the light into microwave wavelengths. we can see nothing beyond the cmb.

look here:
http://universeadventure.org/

Answer 2

Wow, all these answers...some parts are what you are looking for. You are reading these answers because of the light rays bouncing off the screen into your eyes. Visible light is a part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Information is carried on the electromagnetic spectrum: light rays, radio waves, X-rays, all radiation. However it can only carry bits of information in the right size. These quanta of light measure in distance at what is called the planck-length. In theory there was a point in time--a few billionths of a second after the Big Bang--when the universe, starting from a point and then expanding, was smaller than the planck length. So, any information before that point cannot be transmitted out on the electromagnetic spectrum. Yes, light traveling from the Sun when it gets to our eyes is approx 8 minutes old, the Sun is 8 light minutes away. So, we cannot see the Sun as it is NOW, we see it as it was 8 minutes ago. So, the deeper in space you look, the further back in time you are seeing because of the information carrier--the electromagnetic spectrum. But, you can only observe what the electromagnetic spectrum can trasmit.

Answer 3

The first answer is right. Every star in the sky that you see is as it was thousands, millions, or billions of years ago...

The farther we can look into space, the farther we can look back in time... This does not mean we "time traveled"...

This is the meaning of a light-year... which is a measure of distance and is the distance light can travel in a year... light travels at 300,000,000 meters per second, there are 3600 seconds in an hour, 24 hours in a day, and 365 days in a year... you do the math at what distance that is...

So a stellar object's light that is 1 light-year away will take 1 year to reach Earth... and so on...

The Universe is about 135 billion light-years across... or so they say, so if we were to look from one point on the circumference directly across, we would look about 135 billion years in the past...

Time travel is still a theoretically impossible feat as our science knows it today, and has never been performed... probably never will be in ours or any lifetime for millions of years (if the human race survives that long, and if it IS in fact possible)

Answer 4

Interesting...there is one answer that I read that says everything we are seeing in space happened billions of years ago..so what is really happening now??

Time travel is an incorrect play on words. It's not going back in time that you're looking for. Everything has a vibration. Everything that once was still is because of the vibration or blueprint it left behind. In order to "go back in time" or go back to an event, all a person would need to do is tap into the vibrations of the specific event. For example: Let's say you place a ball on the ground and leave it there for about an hour. Then you decide to move it an hour later. The ball left behind vibrations that are still present in the area in which you placed it one hour ago. The ball is no longer there but the vibrations of the matter that was previously there still remain. It's as if earth took a picture of the matter before it was moved. If science could find a way to tap into these vibrations, then yes "time travel" so to speak would be possible. But you are not defying time..because time doesn't exist..it's the vibrations of the event that still exist.

Answer 5

It is at the electron size or smaller. They discovered, in a sense, that the smaller you look, the more information about the beginnings is discovered. It is very complex. The first thing that you have to accept is that they have discovered that time is ultimately non-exsistent. You know that you can "travel into the future" right? Well if not then this is how. If you were to go into space, ther farther that you get away from Earth, the more you travel into the future. While you are in space, the Earth is going to rotate as usual. It will continue to do this as you get farther and farther away from it. Since time is irrelevant in the universe, the distance would determine the "time" away from Earth. Unltimately it would result in people on Earth aging at their rate and you aging at your rate, which would be the same. You are travelling away from Earth and when you got back everyone would be much older or already dead. I am talking if you traveled a couple light years away. The way that they discovered this was through mathmatics. Then, when a twin went and spent time on the space station and when he came back he was about 5-10 seconds younger than his twin brother. Anyway, it is all confusing but you could pick up some physics books and they could explain it better.

Answer 6

What they mean is that space-time (at least our concept of it) is contained within our universe and that there is no way (in our universe) to observe anything before the existence of space-time.

They're not making a comment on how far back they can currently observe by looking at objects that moved the opposite direction as us (if an event happened simultaneously in our galaxy and some other galaxy, the event in our own galaxy is gone into history long before we see the same event from some other galaxy).

A comment on the size of the universe. The universe is estimated to be only around 13 - 14 billion years old. That limits the size of the observable universe (basically any part of the universe that could have any effect on us) to 15.8 billion light years away (once again, that doesn't mean we've observed objects 15.8 billion light years away, since it will be 15.8 billion years from now that that light finally reaches us).

Answer 7

By the way, they have to use the Hubble space telescope because things that far away are extremely faint by the time the light reaches here. The universe is 13.7 billion years old, though now, some say that it's more like 16 billion years old. That means that the farthest thing we can see is 13.7 billion light years away or 16 billion light years depending on the age of the universe. That's because light travels at 300000 km/h, that's one light year/year based to definition. So light from 13.7 billion light years away needs to travel 13.7 billion years to reach here.

Now, looking far far away is like looking back in time because light itself needs time to travel. So let's say a star is 40 light years away. In 1966, it exploded in a supernova (there's no star known that close that's massive enough to do that). The light from the supernova travels and travels. After 40 years, it finally reaches us. Now, you can think of light as carrying a message that the star exploded. Since it won't reach us until 2006 (that's this year), we won't see the star explode until 2006. By the way, if that's really true, then the deadly gamma and X-ray from the explosion will probably have killed all life on Earth by now.

Answer 8

They can calculate the age of the universe because light has a finite velocity. They can calculate the distance of a light source by checking its color; by doing so, they can calculate the wavelength of light. If light is traveling away from the earth, it will have a different wavelength and appear a different color; much like the doppler effect in sound; except here the doppler effect is for color.

In any case, time trivel back in time is impossible because of one thing; one cannot create or destroy mass. By going back in time, you'd add your mass to the equilibrium of the universe. Since entropy doesn't allow such a thing, it is simply impossible to do. You can travel forward in time if you cut through a wormhole around which light travels; light would take the circumfrenced route, while you'd take the route through the diamater. It'd be weird.

Answer 9

Light travels at a certain speed. Since we're so far away from the center of the big bang, what we see actually happend millions of years ago. Nebula, stars, etc, all are images of things from the past. Even the moon is a few millions of a second ago.

Answer 10

It is not the video cameras per se that "went back"; rather, the information received.

The subject of time travel is thick with opinion and contention. You may hear a lot more on this subject!