Here's another one for my philosophically minded friends. On the basis that the image you see in a mirror is the reflection of your
former self, due to the time it takes the light to travel from your person to the mirror and back again, if you were to line up a sufficient number of mirrors, so as to be reflecting one another back and forth, would you eventually see yourself as a foetus?
3 comments:
Surely this is absurd. The light reflected can only originate from the point that one stands in front of a mirror. That image could never regress to a point before the subject was to project his/her image upon the mirror, like some sort of reflective divine memory.
Yep, fair point. That's kind of where the argument falls down.
Thom is absolutely right, you could only see as far back as when you stepped in front of the mirror. Also multiple mirrors will not necessarily be enough, you just need an optical path length long enough to keep the photons busy for the amount of time you want to look back (or rather stall time, you can't look back)
So if you looked through a telescope at a mirror on a planet 10 light-years away you could watch your own birth. Equally if it were 417 light-years away you could watch the battle of Hastings in real time. Since even information cannot travel faster than the speed of light it is meaningless to say an event has happened until the information has reached the point of observation. So on a planet 21 light-years away you haven't been born yet; the idea of a universal timeframe is flawed
Post a Comment