Some Observations on Time and Space

If I look through a telescope at a star whose light takes nearly a hundred years to reach the earth, I see that star as it was nearly a hundred years ago. For all I know it may not be in that position now: it may have exploded at some time during the last century, or it may now be in a different part of the sky. In any event what impinges on my retina is the light that left that star all those years ago. But this is no different from what happens when I look at anything else. If I look at a person in the same room as myself I see him not as he is "now" but as he was at some point in the past--namely the length of time ago that it has taken light to travel from him to me. In our ordinary lives the distance involved, and therefore the time-intervals are so minuscule that we ignore them--in fact we are unaware of their existence. But they do exist. And this has the following consequence.

If, on the star I was talking of, there is a sentient being looking at our earth through a telescope, he sees our earth as it was nearly a hundred years ago (in our time). If his telescope is a super-powerful one which enables him to observe human movements, he could be sitting there in my "now" watching World War I being fought. He is watching not a record of the events, or some sort of re-run of them, as in a film, or anything of that sort: he is watching them. He is looking at the events themselves, and seeing the same things as an officer standing on the battlefield with a pair of field glasses. Both of them are receiving the same light waves travelling towards them at the same speed, and impinging in the same way on the lenses through which they are looking. The sentient being with the telescope is as direct an observer of events as the officer on the battlefield.

If, at the same time by our time, on a different star almost two thousand light-years away, another observer is observing our earth with an even more powerful telescope, he could be watching the crucifixion of Jesus. From the star much nearer, someone could be directly observing the Battle of Hastings. And from a star nearer still, someone could be watching the first Queen Elizabeth processing through the crowded streets of sixteenth-century London. Events not only in human history but of the whole history of the earth could be directly observed simultaneously by watchers from stars at different distances. And there would be nothing supernatural about any of it. We are familiar with the idea of God as a being who sees the whole of history simultaneously, but a group of human beings could do it if they were able to set up appropriate observation equipment in the right places. There would be no time-travel involved in any of it, and no magic or miracles. They would merely connecting themselves up to something that is going on all the time.

From the book Ultimate Questions by Bryan Magee