Re: Talking about distance

On Jan 22, 9:46 am, Martin Brown <|||newspam...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

The same issue often comes up when I tell folks that the Sun is 8 light
minutes away from the Earth, or that one's own hand held in front of own's
face is one billionth of a second away.

Everything you see is where it was when the light left it.

Incorrect.

The foreground Milky Way stars would rotate to an external galaxy
therefore the position at the time a star goes supernova and the time
we witnessed it,the foreground stars would have altered their
position,this being the whole point of Roemer's original insight
regarding positional displacement rather than anomalous motion via
Jupiter's satellite Io.

This undisciplined premise that everything is in the 'past' is not
fit for any human being and to promote it to kids as some kind of
achievement is nothing but indoctrination into the worse side of human
reasoning that I can think of.



In what sense is it true that M31 might no longer exist, or that one's hand
might no longer exist, or that anything and everything might no longer exist
no matter how arbitrarly close we are to it? I have never been comfortable
with this "might not exist" stuff, and maybe it is because of some vague
ideas of Relativity and a "light cone".

Might no longer exist really only makes sense for objects where you
can see that they have an intrinsic lifetime that is broadly similar
to or shorter than the light travel time from the object to Earth.

Regards,
Martin Brown

To reclaim astronomy is to reclaim the ability to reason,not just
respect to the celestial arena but it all other endeavors where men
value their lives.I seriously do not know how you manage to promote an
idea of the past other than the one people associate through their
lives ,not just their own but human and natural history.Surely those
who are simply interested in night time observing and magnification
would not trade their own memories of what the past is for a statement
that goes nowhere except to create outlandish and sweeping gestures
about the wider cosmos ?.

Who,for goodness sake,can keep quiet about what the past is ?.

.

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