I’m not sure if I worded my question correctly, but let me try to explain more.
If we use a giant telescope to look at another planet 10 light years away from us, we would be looking at how it was 10 years ago. The thing I don’t understand is how does light store and also transfer all the information about that planet (or all the “data” that ends up in our eyes) and yet it’s still the fastest thing.
In: 94
In very layman terms, information is stored as traceable changes in the properties of something. In this case, that “something” is light, and a property could be intensity. So it’s not that something is added on top of light. Rather, it’s just changing some property of light, which post detection, enables you to make inferences. The speed with which information travels is dependent on how fast you can transfer that “something”.
The distances in space are vast. They’re so vast that even with the fastest thing, light, there’s a significant delay until it travels those distances. Information isn’t a tangible thing, it’s more of a concept. The simple answer is that light transmits a lot of information because there’s a lot of it. If you’re seeing something, anything, you’re seeing pretty much all the light that’s coming from it in your direction.
Light doesn’t carry data per se. When a photon bounces off an object it’s intensity and/or wavelength is altered by the thing it bounces off of.
So one can imagine a massive number of photons each being altered by what it reflects off of. Think of shooting billions and billions of white ping pong balls at an object and those ping pong balls changing color and intensity based on the element they bounce off of or pass through.
I mean in very simple terms, That speed is exactly why. Because by pulsing the light or modulating it or something like that very quickly you can essentially create ups and downs that effectively code to ones and zeros which can then be easily transferred very quickly over a fiber optic cable
Information doesn’t weigh anything. Also, light isn’t the fastest thing. It’s very close but in most cases, it’s not even moving at the speed of light.
The “speed of light” is just what we called the universal speed limit because light was the first thing that appeared to move around that speed. But more realistically, it should be called the speed of causality. Or just it’s variable C. Because light itself moves at a speed related to what medium it travels in. Light through water is much slower than light through space.
Things like gravity move at that universal limit. Always.
It’s just light waves of different lengths. These reach our eyes and our eyes/brain process the light that hit our face. There is no “information” in it besides what our brains make of it. Just like throwing a rock into a pond creates waves. Those waves don’t really mean anything unless you make them mean something, they’re just there.
Why would the speed of the light affect the information it carries? Maybe reform you question with another post as there isn’t an answer to what you are saying.
Imagine if someone throws a basketball at you. You catch it. That’s like one bit of light, one photon. One piece of information. You could use basketballs to bounce of a building, then build a giant basketball “antenna” that would catch them after they rebounded. The speed the basketball bounces doesn’t change the information it carries. You could use smaller balls, like ping pong balls , and you’d get a clearer, sharper image of the building. Or use a really small ball, maybe a BB? Even better picture.
the smaller the ‘ball’ that you bounce of something, the sharper the image. but also the more balls it takes. more information, more data. If you were to take apart a digital camera and put its image sensor under a microscope, you would see that it’s really just a ball catcher in a grid.
The amount of information we receive *is* greatly diminished by light traveling such long distances. In fact, the amount of information we can receive is proportional to just how many photons we can actually catch. If we only catch a single photon we would only be able to determine information about that one “particle” of light – color for example.
When we make a bigger device, like a space telescope, it covers a really wide area and collects all of that light together to be able to glean additional information in an instant snapshot – “there’s a circular object”, detected by the difference in how much light was caught from different areas on the satellite’s mirrors; there was light in some places and not in others, and the border formed a circle.
Then we go one step further and compare that information over time to see more information: “this spot in the snapshot was light last snapshot and dark this one” or “that spot is brighter than this spot” gives us information about texture, or features, or speeds or movement, etc.
But to get “all of the information” from a planet, we would need to capture *all* of the light it emits, including the light coming off the far side of the planet. That would mean we need a mirror array that *completely encloses the planet*, and that’s unachievable even if we were really close by. Instead, the further you are and the smaller your apparatus, the less information you’re able to collect at a single time, and the more you have to make conclusions by comparing the image over time and noticing differences.
As for how light can transfer “a lot of data” and still be fast, it’s actually only able to transfer a lot of data *because* it’s fast – an individual photon can only transfer a miniscule amount of actual data, but we can observe trillions of them in rapid succession. Each “packet” of data is tiny, but because the transfer rate is so high we can collect a lot of information in short time by seeing the changes and variations in that tiny bit of data. This is the principle of fiber-optic cabling in computers: the information being sent over a single channel on the line is *only* a 1 or a 0 (on or off, lit or dark). But we can toggle that back and forth extremely rapidly, so in a short period of time we can capture billions of individual signals that are each individually extremely simple binary “on or off” messages, and translate that huge volume of tiny data into a large dataset / something useful.
Check how tv remotes work principally. You will understand what info travels with light (it doesnt.) all info as you call it is modulation. There is no thing as “info”
Two things :
– Light isn’t carrying the “data” as a payload in it. We interpret whatever we receive.
– strictly speaking, what we see is not how it started out as, so there is loss involved. If that was not the case then distant stars wouldn’t appear dimmer than closer ones.
Latest Answers