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Comment by aceazzameen | Hacker News Reader

I like to think that the light that reached me is just a record of things that already happened.

Yes but you cannot tell exactly what happened without the light reaching you. Sure you can guess. For example, if you know the state of a star a few billion years ago, with no other information after that, you can calculate at what point it would become a supernova. But without the light reaching you, there is no way to tell whether it actually became a supernova or something else happened (eg - it got swallowed by a black hole etc.)

“I can’t see it” != “it hasn’t happened”

“I can’t see it” == “I don't know whether it happened or not”

The person(s) you're talking too are not talking about epistemology. If something happened yesterday and I am not aware of it until I read the paper today, the thing still happened yesterday. If I never read about it, the thing still happened yesterday.

Whether/when I "know" about it is separate, and not what they're talking about.

"I don't know" very often (uncertain topics, for certain people) cannot be implemented, that's "just" how it "is".

It might actually be useful to think of that as an equivalency because “c” is the fastest rate by which one part of the universe interacts with another part. I think of the universe branching off by the further in spacetime these interactions have to travel. The whackiest QM interactions are still bounded by “c.” The distances between events are called space-like precisely because light/etc would have to travel faster than light to go from A to B.

Then there’s ER=EPR to try to conceptualize.

I agree you can't tell what happened after a observing a recorded event. If you were to read someone's diary from a decade ago, you wouldn't know what they were doing now. You need new observations.

The OP was referring to when a event happened though.

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