You are reading a single comment by @itsbruce and its replies.
Click here to read the full conversation.
London Fixed Gear and Single-Speed is a community of predominantly fixed gear and single-speed cyclists in and around London, UK.
This site is supported almost exclusively by donations. Please consider donating a small amount regularly.
itsbruce
There's something about the "seeing them as they were 13bn years ago" that doesn't sit right with me.
Yes, those photons have been travelling for 13bn years in our subjective time frame, but the notion that we are seeing the galaxies in the past seems to presuppose the notion that there is some kind of universal now.
My knowledge of relativity is not up to knowing the intricacies of this, but it just seems like a fallacy to say that we see those galaxies in the past, in a way that is different from me looking at this mobile phone "now".
Given that the photons that are coming off the screen of my phone took some finite time to travel across the intervening space between the screen and my eyes, I am seeing it in the past too.
By extension, we see everything in the "past", there is no such thing as "now".