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Saturday, February 23, 2013

Easy peasy Time Travel Recipe


Written by: Kaichee Mayo

So I've always been fascinated by the concept of playing with time, to be able to twist it at your own will, to re-live your most glorious moments, to peek into the future and see how things turn out so that you can be less afraid of doing them in the present .... whatever the reason  might be I believe that everyone in their lifetime has (at least once) fantasized about time travel. Over the years scientists have pondered upon the idea, trying to devise practical means to accomplish the task ... authors have written books on it .. movie makers have directed films based on the concept but nothing close to reality.

Well heres a wild thought , what if i told you, that you could .. yes YOU could time travel, using just your eyes and faith in the knowledge that im about to share with you (or you could just google it up if you find it hard to trust the words of an anonymous blogger lol).

Alright so this particular way of time traveling is not typical.. its more like looking in the magic sphere (uknow where the old witch shows you your future in a misty glass sphere, and NO this isn't one of those lame fb apps lol) this time journey involves being able to see the past only .. and of course you cant tamper with the occurrences either (the grandfather paradox anyone? lol)

Having said that, i am going to change the topic entirely (trust me it'll all make sense by the time we reach the end). I like stargazing a lot .. and when i look up theres all sorts of shiny sparkley stars scattered all over the sky, now when dealing with these stars and nebulas and other galaxies one must realize the immensity of the distances over which they are spread ... they are very very very far away, SO far that even the fastest traveling particle/wave (yes you guessed it right lol) takes years to reach those distant stars and galaxies .. take for instance the nearest star system (a star with orbiting planets around it, much like our 'solar' system) Alpha Centauri, its 4.367 light years away from earth, meaning if high intensity light was thrown in the direction of Alpha Centauri, it would take the photons 4.367 years to reach an imaginary (or not, who knows lol) photo receptor at the other end.

Moving forward  (or backwards should i say) elementary science, how do we see things? Ans: we see things when light hits different objects and is reflected back, when it reaches the eye it forms an image in our head with the help of some fancy neurons that we were then too young to understand (some of us still don't sadly).

Now try to merge those two concepts and view them in a time traveler's perspective. lets take an example, one of my favorite stars the Betelgeuse in the Orion is 640 light years away, its a Red giant- dying star (or already dead perhaps). So when i look up towards the orion and see Betelgeuse, with its slightly orange tint (yes you can ACTUALLY see the redish/orangeish color with naked eye on a clear night) what im seeing is not the Betelgeuse of present ... the image that i see is formed in my head by light that was reflected off Betelgeuse 640 years ago. If the Star were to explode in a supernova today, I would not see it exploding for another 640 years, so till that time i will continue to see the usual Betelgeuse that i so adore, and even though its already dead, it will still shine upon me for as long as i live (cuz i cant possibly live to be 640 .. unless im immortal lol).

So tonight when you look up .. think to yourself, all these stars are images of the past ... maybe some of them don't even exist anymore, but i can still see them cuz im a friggin time traveler *Feel Awesome*

p.s. its all about perspective.

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