Friday, August 23, 2013

Distance of Light: A Brief History of Time


by Stephen Hawking

Stephen Hawking excels at providing complex scientific information and theory in an accessible manner. His books are full of so many facts and mind blowing analysis that it's often difficult to absorb. When dealing with the limits of humans perception, he speaks about viewing much of the universe through images from telescopes. This ultimately depends on our perception of light and because light has a finite speed, we are seeing mostly light that has traveled from a far distance.

Similarly, we do not know what is happening at the moment farther away in the universe: the light that we see from distant galaxies left them millions of years ago, and in the case of the most distant object that we have seen, the light left some eight thousand million years ago. Thus, when we look at the universe, we are seeing it as it was in the past.

If this doesn't blow your sensory perception mind, I don't know what will. 

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