Earlier quoted context omitted.
Given that the speed of light is the speed of causality, technically it's not really 420 million years in the "past" in any meaningful sense. The present is relative, not universal. The collected light we see in our telescopes is a lie about a particular universe that will never be, at least in any tangible way. On a cosmic scale, every spot in the universe sees its own unique sequence of events going on around it, a…
I’ll admit I’m severely undereducated in this stuff, probably less than an average high schooler these day but nevertheless I feel like I’ve considered this before and never knew it had a name. Which makes me feel not completely stupid. > whether two spatially separated events occur at the same time – is not absolute, but depends on the observer's reference frame. But What I don’t understand about this is why is “tim…
Not so, I would say.
Space and time are inherently linked under special (and General) relativity. For two observers who have relative motion between them, the space (distance between two 'events') and time (between the said events) are both different.
When some poem or a song talks about the universe being frozen at a given instant of time, that can be only in a given reference frame. There's no absolute time for the universe.