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Asked by eevee to Adam, Geoff, Rob, Sheila, Suzie on 23 Mar 2011 in Categories: General.
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Adam Tuff answered on 23 Mar 2011:
The key here is we can only see what’s happened in the past – to see things in the futue means that we would have to see the light from objects before they were emitted – this isn’t physically possible to the laws that we know. For this reason it seems unlikely we could see into the future.
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Suzie Sheehy answered on 23 Mar 2011:
I’m not entirely sure what you mean, but I personally don’t think there’s a way to exactly predict the future. We can build up good theories of what is happening to try and predict things but often the problems are too complex to solve!
As for looking at the ‘creation of the universe’ we can see radiation out in space called the cosmic microwave background radiation that was left over from the formation of the universe. There were some other questions about this, so have a read through if you want to know more! -
Robert Simpson answered on 23 Mar 2011:
Yes! This is the basis for a lot of astronomy – seeing things as they were years ago. You see the Sun as it was 8 minutes ago and you see the stars are they were thousand or millions of years ago. There is something called the cosmic microwave background that is the low-frequency echo of the Big Bang. We can use this to measure and understand the properties of the universe from around the time the universe was formed.
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Sheila Kanani answered on 23 Mar 2011:
We sort of do this to infer the past, like with redshift and light arrival times. That is why we can see so close to the Big Bang and can infer the creation of the universe. I’m not sure about predicting the future though, it’d only ever be a prediction and it might turn out wrong!
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