3 ms·
I believe what you’re talking about with an universal ordering of events is called the Relativity of Simultaneity. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_of
by rolleiflex 6y ago
I believe what you’re talking about with an universal ordering of events is called the Relativity of Simultaneity. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_of_simultaneity https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_of_simultaneity
I believe you are correct in that the closest you can get to change the order of two events is to make them simultaneous (in the case of photons, which do not experience time) but you cannot change one event ordering beyond that since that would violate causality.
- 8note 6y agoYou could change the event ordering by forcing some events to take a longer path through space? For a real world example, we can predict supernovas because we've already seen them from another trajectory of light: https://youtu.be/ljoeOLuX6Z4 https://youtu.be/ljoeOLuX6Z4 so we can both see the remote event before and after local events
- javert 6y agoRelative to a clock on earth, moving at a given speed relative to the speed of light, the supernova happened when it happened. All that is changing with lensing is that you're seeing the light coming from it earlier looking in one direction than another. Either way, it happened in the past. The order of events is not changing. It's like saying that a stock trader using a fiber connection figures out about a price movement more quickly than a stock trader using a dial-up connection. At least, I think that's right; not a physicist.