Not going, but LOOKING back in time.

[darkcool]

*Originally posted by borschevsky *
**I remember having an idea about using a black hole for something like this. If you were to shoot a beam of light just outside the event horizon, the black hole’s gravity would slingshot the light back around at you (or so it seems to me). If you want to see some photons that left Earth a hundred thousand years ago, you just need to look at a black hole 50,000 light years away.

Of course, you still have all the practical problems with resolution, etc., but I thought it was an interesting idea. **

Cool idea. Not really to the OP, but something science ought to think about. May give us some clues to early earth.
There are some in the ‘neighborhood’.

[Bob_Scene]

*Originally posted by Anthracite *
**

*Originally posted by Bob Scene *
*Quantum mechanics implies that information can never be destroyed, so I think it’s theoretically possible to reconstruct everything that ever happened.

[sub]*A drastic oversimplification, I know.[/sub] **

I posted something along those lines in GD, and got spanked over chaos theory, which I was told would invalidate any notion of a clockwork universe by which conservation of information would work. **

There’s no conflict between chaos theory and information conservation, except in the mind of someone who doesn’t understand either one. Information conservation derives from conservation of matter and energy and so is not invalidated by chaos theory. But the reason I said it’s theoretically possible to reconstruct everything that ever happened is that, thanks to chaos, you can never practically reconstruct anything complex. That doesn’t mean the information’s been lost, though. If it did, physicists wouldn’t be arguing about whether or not information can survive in a black hole, for example.