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Thread: question about lasers
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2021-08-30, 01:30 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: question about lasers
Anyone who's been in a thunderstorm knows from experience that sound can be "late". It's only logical for light to be the same. Light is just fast enough that we can't notice in our everyday life.
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Originally Posted by Fyraltari
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2021-09-01, 04:31 AM (ISO 8601)
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2021-09-20, 10:20 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Jun 2005
Re: question about lasers
But the point is that "seeing something" in that sense isn't a direct interaction between viewer and viewed. The direct interaction is between the viewer and light.
Someone watching a video recording may well refer to observed events as happening "currently", but if I ask "Wait, do you think this is a live broadcast?", I expect a response along the lines of "Oh, no, I was speaking non-literally in a sense that I thought was obvious from context" (unless they mistakenly believe that it is a live broadcast). And I'd expect the space station crew to similarly reply that, oh, no, of course they don't actually think that this is happening as they watch it, as a naive interpretation of their statements would suggest.
Similarly, if someone refer to how things "really are" in a work of fiction that they can reasonably be assumed to realize is fictional, it's normally understand from context that they don't think that the events actually happened, but are instead speaking about what happens in the story rather than what characters in the story believe. Words take on non-standard meanings in non-standard contexts!
Well, in the sense that any word can be defined in any way... obviously, yes.
In normal everyday usage, "now" and "the present" refer to the times at which those phrases are used, with each usage corresponding to the time of that usage. It's just like how "here" refers to the location in which "here" is said.
You may not take the above for granted, but available evidence suggests that that makes you the weird one, and that the problem is your peculiar misunderstanding of common usage rather than widespread departure form common usage, which seems to me rather a contradiction in terms. At the very least, misunderstanding on your part seems like a parsimonious explanation for various people seeming to independently depart from normal usage of "now". What's the alternative explanation, the popularization of non-standard usage in science by academics? But I'd expect to have seen more complaints of this supposed misuse of "now" were that the case. I'm pretty sure that I've never encountered one before.
Like, I get that we're not a dreadfully representative sample of anything, but if the available theories are that you don't understand what "now" means or that no one else in this thread understands what "now" means, the odds very much are not in your favor.
Relativity of simultaneity, like much (all?) of special relativity, is based on events not happening at the same times as which they're observed.
At this point I'm fairly baffled. Which of those things do you think isn't possible in our own frame of reference, and why? I'm guessing that you're assuming some sort of unusual definition of either "observe" or "measure".