Do We See Everything As It Was In The Past?

Question

I mean like, light doesn't travel at infinite speed, we see the sun as it was 8 minutes ago, & we see the andromeda galaxy as it was 2.2 million years ago, so does that mean everything we see in front of our eyes, no matter how recent, is technically from the past?

Answer 1

light travels so fast beyond our memory.  The north star is 1 million light years away.  figure that and I will be gone

Answer 2

Exactly right.  even the light from your monitor has to travel a very small distance (resulting in a minuscule period of time) to reach your eyes, be interpreted by your brain, and fed into your consciousness.  

if there were a way to find a black hole with nothing orbiting it, we could use a telescope and find a point near the black hole, where it would be the light right back to the earth, and we would see ourselves, in the past.

Good luck living your life after learning that everything you "see" already happened, so according to physics, you miss it every time.

Answer 3

Right.  Fortunately, light travels fast enough that anything in our interactive vicinity is virtually simultaneous with our perception.  

Answer 4

Yep! You got it.

Answer 5

Yes. Even as I look at my computer screen, and see the letters typing out, they were actually there before I saw them. Now, because light travels to fast, I don't notice a lag between me pressing the key, and me seeing the letters on the computer (unless a virus got into my computer). So everything I see, I am technically seeing in the past.

So when we look up at the sun, it really isn't where we see it... that was its position 8 minutes before. And then we have really distant objects, like the most distant galaxy which is 13.28 billion light years away.... it is because we are looking 13.28 billion years back, that we can tell how galaxies looked when they first formed.... this is the picture of what the first galaxies looked like, right after the big bang. Using this, we can tell how galaxies have evolved over time.

Answer 6

Yes that is right and the amazing thing is that, the farther we see, the farther in the past we see, hence the Big Bang is not a point in space but a sphere around us!

Some 130,000 years after the Big Bang, the universe cooled down just enough for particles to exist. from that, electromagnetic energy radiated and decayed with time. After Hubble's red-shift discovery Lemaitre's idea of the Big Bang was suggested again, such a radiation was predicted to be in the microwave frequency range.

Lo and behold, a couple of decades later, by pure hazard, such a radiation was discovered, the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) and ... it comes from all directions in the sky!

The past is all around us!