I Live in the Past - So do You!

On January 02, 2008 in Science Related

As I was driving home from New Years break in Florida, I started wondering in my thoughts. That car that just passed me, I didn’t know that it was passing me until after it had already passed me. And I didn’t really know that it was now in front of me until after it was already in front of me. Sound weird? That’s because it likely is, but let me explain.

Light travels at 186,000 miles per second, unlike my ‘96 Chevy Cavalier which travels at about half the speed of smell. The sun is 93,000,000 miles from the earth, meaning it takes the light about 8 minutes to arrive here from there. So when you look up at the Sun, you are actually seeing it as it was 8 minutes ago, not as it currently is. So if the Sun were to theoretically explode, you wouldn’t see the explosion until 8 minutes after the fact.

The Moon is about 250,000 miles from the Earth, much closer than the Sun. The moons light travels 186,000 miles closer to the earth in a second, meaning we see the Moon as it was just over a second ago, but again, not as it presently is.

It’s a little hard to think of, but let’s try to bring it a little closer to home. Ever seen a man on his house down the street hammering a nail into a board? You see him drop the hammer, only to hear the crack of the nail a second later. It’s almost like a bad movie where the audio and video aren’t really sync’d up. The speed of sound is variable, but on a dry day the speed of sound may be recorded at just over 1,000 feet per second. That is much much slower than the speed of light, which is to thank for the image of the man working. So the image of the man working arrives much sooner than the sound of the man working.

Even the sounds we hear are mere recordings of the past. The very near past, but the past none the less. When I was sitting in the car with my wife, I merely heard her words as they were recorded in the compressed and rarefied air between us just moments after the vibrations of her voice shuffled the air molecules towards me. I didn’t actually hear her as she spoke, but merely after the fact, again.

You see, I live in the past. The very near past, but the past none-the-less. I don’t even see the letters on this computer screen as I type them. For they show up after I’ve already typed them. And I’m not authoring this article as each proceeding sentence comes to mind, since I must first think of the words to write, send commands to my fingers to type, which in turn send electrical impulses to the computer to insert a specific character in a certain location, only to change the image on my screen which then needs to reflect it light back to my eyes, which translate the light into an image that my brain can understand.

Everything I enjoy is already gone by the time I enjoy it. Or is it? Is there anything that I enjoy that is in the present, the technical present that I’ve never been able to see, hear, taste or touch? Are my thoughts present? What is the speed of thought? How do we begin to measure such a thing or quantify the rate at which we understand ourselves.

I’m such a geek, I know.

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