The Theory of Special Relativity was introduced by Albert Einstein in 1905, and deals with events which take place at great distances from one another with respect to the speed of light: 186,240 miles per second. The whole idea is that a radio signal, sent from earth to a spaceship moving away from us at a high rate of speed, will take a progressively longer time to reach the ship as its distance from earth increases; when it is 186,240 miles out the signal will take one second to cover the distance; when the ship is 670 million miles away the signal will take almost an hour to reach the ship. If it is a time signal ( "it is twelve noon" ) the clock on the ship will show nearly one o'clock when the signal arrives. The crew might then, ignoring the time differential, set the ship's clock back to match the earth-time signal. As the ship moves farther away the time difference becomes ever greater. This model, poorly understood by academics who missed their true calling as stevedores, was cobbled into the preposterous notion that time actually slowed down on the departing spaceship. It's called Time Dilation and it is pure and utter nonsense. According to this "theory" a person travelling on a spaceship departing the earth. depending upon how far he went and at what velocity, would return only to find that, while he had spent a only couple of decades out there, several decades would have passed on the earth. All his contemporaries would be much older than himself, those that were still alive, that is.The fact is that if the delay in signal time which causes the clock on the spaceship to be continually turned back would be reversed on the ship's return journey. As the lag time shortens, the ship's clock would now have to be continually set ahead until, when back on earth the two clocks would record the exact same time. And this would occur without recourse to the speed of light.Time is an immutable scalar, an invention used to measure change, and only goes forward, never backward. Time is not a naturally occurring phenomenon; there are no clocks hanging from trees in the forest, racoons don't wear wristwatches, and never has a pigeon been known to stop a pedestrian on a downtown sidewalk and ask for the correct time. Time travel, another fantasy that occupies otherwise productive intellects, is impossible as all the changes that time records would have to be un-changed. Imagine un-eating every meal you've consumed between the present time and your target date of the past; you would have to un-sleep all the sleep you've gotten, and reverse every action taken in the interval. Time, though an invention of mankind, still exists, and in the matters at hand is an important consideration as respects our view of the universe. We may consider thepossibility that the distant, or not so distant stars that we see in the night sky, may in fact be in more than one place at one time. Now to explain.Many of our astronomical theories accept the speed of light as a constant, when it celarly is not. The speed co light, c, is vaiable depending upon the medium through which it passes. Any spear fisherman knows that the fish he is after is not hwre it appears to be but somewhat closer; this because light travels more slowly through water, a denser medium. Light cannot penetrate a thick fog, and cannot even pass completely through clear glass.Light is the ultimate energy transfer medium. Physicists have puzzled for years over its true nature; is it a wave or is it a particle? The ansswer is: It's both. A clue comes from the field of electrical engineering, specifically alternating current. Alternating current is generated by dynamos that spin a conductor ( a coil of wires ) through a magnetic field, thus producing the current ( flow of electrons ). A picture of this process may be seen on the screen of an oscilloscope, a device specially deisgned to show variations in voltage and current. The figure that apopears on the screen is a sine wave, but this is a two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional figure. Rotate it 90° with respect to the horizontal and you will see a circle; rotate it 45° and you will see a spiral, an exact representation of the action of the generator. Light must be like that: traveling in a spiral path, thus giving it both the properties of a wave and of a particle. It would also explain how light " gets around " things.Light has certain components that are a function of wavelength and fequency. At the high end of the scale ae x-rays, very energetic energy bundles with very short wavelengths and ultra-high frequencies. X-rays are capable of penetrating hardened steel because their wavelengths are so small that they can pass between the atoms of a material, their frequencies so high that they encounter virtually no interference from matter at he atomic level. At the low end are infra-red emissions with much greater wavelengths and much lower frequencies.
One erroneous belief that has flavored astronomical theory is that the speed of light through space is constant. If light can be slowed by passing through a dense medium, hlted by clouds, and bent by gravity on earth and within our sphere of perception, you cn bet that the same thing happpens " out there ". It's just not easily apparent. Oh, fifty or sixty years ago, when outer space was thught to be a hygenically devoid of any matter at all, then light would have had the freedom to streak across space at incredible speeds! But that's not at all how it is out there.The universe is full of matter; solid and gaseous, and gravitational fields in complex patterns and various levels of intensity, some ibcredibly strong, that affect starlight as it traverses the lightyears that separate them from ourselves.And light just ignores all these influences, doesn't slow, doesn't bend a little here and there? Just like Black Holes: the " theory " is all that matters; let's just ignore density and friction as all this matter implodes on itself.Nikolai Lobachevski, the famous Russian mathemetician, proposed the idea that space is curved. This idea was based on Michelson and Morley's measurement of the speed of light and Michael Faraday's concept of magnetic fields. Of course the cosmos isn't truly curved; this is merely the illusion created by the time-delay of the light reaching us from far distant celestial objects. This remarks not the actual curvature of space, but out experience with it using light as the standard. But suppose we could use light as a standard in a different and more useful way?Try shining a light on an object through glass. You will see the object illuminated alright, but you will also note a disk of light on the surface of the glass. These are the wavelengths and frequencies of light that were unable to pass through the glass. In other words they were filtered. Now try the same test with a sheet of waxed paper; noticeably less light gets through but some still does. A sheet if light tracing paper will admit stuill less light but, again, some gets through. A thin sheet of card stock will block the light entirely; but does none of it get through? Discrete, largely undetectable light quanta; x-ray, miscrowave, and UV tays must certainly penetrate the opaque obstacle, as they are also components of white light. White light is, after all, a combonation of all wavelengths and frequencies of light; when white light is passed though a ruby crystal and its frequencies are synchronized into one the result is Laserlight. Ever wonder why laser light is always red? Now you know.We also know that light can be selectively filtered out of an optical event; an object can thus be made to disappear. One of my homes had red drapes in the livingroom. The early morning sun would shine on the livingroom windows and be filtered through the drapes. I had a pair of slippers that were the same shade of red and at these times in the morning, if the slippers were on the floor a few feet away - I couldn't see them. At the time I smoked cigarettes that came in a package about the same shade of red as the drapes and the slippers, and I could barely make it out from a few feet away.Now let us turn our attention to uter space with all its bodies, gases, and debris. Telscope photos of galaxies, nebulae, and gas clouds, show a profusion of color and an infinite variety of densities. We therefore have the two influences we have been noting above: filtering and opacity. May we guess what happens to light over the course of tens-, hundreds-, thousand- or millions of light years? Suppose that the more energetic x-ray and microwave transmissions were able to pull ahead of the slower moving ultraviolet light; and if these UV emissions were in turn able to outrun the visible light components, and these could outrun the still-slower moving, less energetic infra-red and radio waves. What would we get if noy bundles of light fronm the same source reaching us at different times? We would detect x-ray stars, UV stars, infra-red stars, and radio stars, in addition to thos visible to the eye. And what do we actualy detect? X-ray, UV, infra-red, and radio stars!Isn't that a co-incidence? Here we have both elements of deductive logic and practical reasoning; antecedents that frame an argumnent and evidence of a definite conclusion to which these facts would directly lead. If light indeed separates into bundles on jourenys of even a few light years, what does that possibly tell us?Astronomers occasionally make comments about the various objects they observe that suggest a slight deviation from the facts. It's when they remark on the location of a particular star, galaxy, nebula, or some other sighting by telling us where it IS. Of course we don't know where it is, only where it was however many years ago. Where are they now? Better yet; where will they be in a few years, decades, centuries? If light truly "unbundles" as suggested here, then we just might be able to answer these questions.
Think about this; a timeline of light emmissions from the most recent to the most historic: the x-rays get here first, then the UVs, then the visible star light, then the infra-red, and finally the radio. If we could connect these perceptions into sets, relating them to one another on the basis of this timeline, we would be able to launch a space vehicle on an intercepting path, to ariive at a point in space when the object also arrives, it would save a lot of time and energy.
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