Does the future already exist? (Andromeda Paradox)

I discovered your channel two days ago, and you have become my favorite science communicator by far! Keep up the great work!

Physicist Carlo Rovelli has a nice short book called "Order of Time" where he explains this quite vividly. Basically "now" is only applicable to "here" and we intuitively extend it to things around, and that kind of works while discrepancies remain too small to notice. But on a larger scale "now" doesn't mean what we're used to, it loses its meaning. All the region of spacetime outside our past and future light cones is "extended present" with no fixed order "before or after or now" relative to us, and it's not directly observable anyway. He offers some casual metaphors from real life to get accustomed to such thinking.

That was the smoothest segue of introducing a sponsor into a YouTube video that I have ever seen. Einstein was asked if a femtosecond is the shortest measurement of time. He answered no. The shortest measurement of time is the time between when a traffic light in New York City turns green and when the driver of the car behind you beeps his horn.

Mahesh, all the hard work in the animations and the smooth delivery of explanations are revolutionary and all, but deep down you know you've turned pro when you've seamlessly segue into the sponsor spot without any transition. Achievement unlocked! Einstein says he is proud. It's ok if you didn't hear it, he was in another frame 😉

Andromeda is not just separated from us in space but also equally in time. Just as we can not reach Andromeda in space, we can not reach it in time. We're essentially de-synced in time by 2.5 million years. If we were to travel to Andromeda, that desync in time would shrink as the distance between us shrank. So when we arrive somewhere we don't just arrive there in space, but also in time. Hence the term, spacetime. With that in mind, the "present" is only local to you, and the further something is from you the more in the past it is from you as well.

This is why it's good to play with simulators that use a speed of light much slower than normal, so one can develop a better feel for how "now" is relative.

The clocks at the start not having a 9 is hurting my soul

This is the first video that's convinced me that faster-than-light travel is impossible, as it would create causal paradoxes: Lets say we have three FTL communicators, two nearby (B & C), and one in Andromeda (A). Lets say B and C are nearby, but C is jogging. B says to A "tell C to tell me to say 42", then A tells C that, but C will hear that message days before B sent it, so can tell B not to send any message at all, creating a paradox.

It is astounding how you've managed to clear up EVERY single follow up question i had after watching your earlier videos (coming in from the triplet paradox video). In three videos you have cleared up questions I've had unanswered for years. You should be required viewing in every science class in every school, anywhere. This is a level of teaching excellence that I've not only never seen before, but never even thought possible.

Sir, Please keep sending us more of your Photons and Phonons recorded from non existing now to the Future

Woah hold your horses, the future does have a meaning in relativity. It's a mirror of the past: everything that can affect us is in our past, everything we can affect is in our future. It is just that these terms are smaller than in our intuition: at a distance, the past does not touch the future, instead there is a huge timeframe of causally disconnected events where you can't agree whether they are in the past, present or future based on your reference frame (we might as well call all of that "quasipresent" or just "present" if we want, baring in mind it is not a moment in time but a huge region in spacetime).

To address the very last question in the video You explain it very well and ill put it in different words: Someone once explained it to me in a very simple way - each observer: me, the jogger and the aliens in Andromeda have their own time. Imagine it like a track, and the word "now" is a point on that track. Since every one has their own track, the word "now" is personal. Ie each person's now will refer to a point along his own tracks - there is no necessity to be able to map each point on your tracks to some point on another's (arbitrary) tracks. They are simply just different tracks, and each observer has chosen a different path through spacetime. You dont have to be able to link these tracks together, why would you?

Never had i seen such a natural integration of an ad . Very nice job Mahesh!

This is most special channel about special relativity!

Oh, I love this. And the topic of the future is really timely. I have been studying the remaining portions of the writings of the pre-socratic philosopher Parmenides of Elea. Really odd stuff. He was of the belief that time was an illusion and that all past, present, and future exist simultaniously. His student was Zeno famous for Zeno's Paradoxes. It has gotten me very interested in the philisophical idea of Eternalism. The fact that even at non-relativistic speeds, different reference frames have different ordering of distant events seems to support this position. But because what is happening distantly can't actually be measured and its information sent to us any faster than light anyway, it ends up leaving the world of science and entering the world of philosophy. Thank you for this video. So good.

You always ask and answer the questions I have after watching other videos. Love it! Keep up the good work.

What a great video! Loved it! When I first learnt relativity I was very puzzled by the Lorentz transformation for time, t'=gamma(t-vx/c^2). It seemed odd that it contained x. Apparently it implied the change in time depends not only on relative speed but also how far away you are. You can get a big change in time by either having a high speed or a big spatial separation. It literally took me years to realize "so what". If only I'd seen your video back in the day! There is a relativity joke in there somewhere but I can't quite grasp it :D. I wonder if I could persuade you to do a video on spacelike intervals where for some observers the effect comes before the cause?

The Andromeda Paradox exemplifies that all of physics happens along time-like curves.

Wow. The way you integrated Squarespace was amazing!

Ur literally my favourite youtuber, ur vids r the most interesting to me in yt than any other, Tq Mahesh sir for making these amazing cool explainer videos. And I'm v happy to see this channel growing in good pace, congrats for 100k subs, but i feel it's still underrated, u deserve a lot more than this and i think ull achieve that soon.