I Do Understand Relativity
southampton.ac.uk
southampton.ac.uk
Author: Prof. Douglas Ross of Southampton University - https://www.southampton.ac.uk/~doug/
For example if you hear something like "did you know that aliens from Alpha Centauri see Earth as it was 2 years ago, as it's the time light from Earth takes to reach Alpha Centauri?". No they do not, because it would assume that there's some common "now" between Earth and Alpha C.
If we assume a common "now", it would lead to a whole bunch of paradoxes and errors, like "what was before the Big Bang?" (error in the question), or "where is the center of the Universe?", or "those faint red-shifted stars that we see as they were almost 13 billion years ago".
I find it's easier to understand if you assume that every entangled particle already "knows" what state it will be at the moment of entanglement. In theory it's called "hidden variables". John Stewart Bell has proven that there's no local hidden variables, but noone said about global variables. For example, in Superdeterminism it's all easy and clear.
PS: Physicists thet reject Superdeterminism only for philosophical reasons, there's no scientific reasons to reject it.
I've always thought of this as true, and I don't understand why it isn't?
There is no "global time clock" and hence in a philosophical sense there is no "common now".
However, the speed of light is constant in the universe and so you can calculate time based on distance traveled by light to you provided you are not moving at speeds comparable to speed of light. This means you can suppose a "common lightyear clock" for measurement.
But when the speeds are comparable to that of light, you have time dilation and length contraction and so even the "common lightyear clock" is invalid. This is the principle of "Relativity of Simultaneity".
The way to think about it is, Events happen in a Space-Time fabric and so in order to measure the interval between two events you have to consider both Space and Time w.r.t. object speed vs. speed of light. The universal invariant here is the "Space-Time Interval" between two events which will be the same for everybody whatever be their mass or speed.
The correct ways to ask the question would be:
1. If we send a signal (like a question "how to you see us") to the Alpha Centauri/MoM-z14 -- what response would we receive from them and when?
2. If we send ourselves aka observer (at the light speed or slower) to the Alpha Centauri/MoM-z14, how would we see Earth when we arrive there?
In both cases the answer would be "like the Earth is today, or later", not "how the Earth was N years ago".
So we cannot move ourselves, even imaginatively, to a distant place faster than speed of light. Otherwise we would be outside our light cone.