Theoretically, when you look at yourself in a mirror, you are looking into the past. Fractions of a second, but that is not the point.

Is there any possible way you can increase the distance the light has to travel so when looking into the mirror you can noticably see that your looking into the past?

How is that possible? Light travels over 180,000 miles per second. There is no stretch of land or space that can give us this distance, or even telescopes to reach such distances.

But what if a series of mirrors were setup hundreds of miles away from each othere that reflected an image up to a distance of 90,000 miles, and then returned the image through the mirrors back to your starting location.

If this were theoretically done and set up, would you then be able to see a second into the past?

If so then could this be done on a nanoscale? Taking a large image, scaling it down, then reflecting the images over small distance trillions of times then scaling the image back to normal size which will produce an image that was happened seconds ago?

This is very far fetched but its something I thought when taking Physics in college. Never really looked into it.

why do you need a mirror? if you look at anything, the light it reflects takes a nonzero amount of time to reach your eye

Telescopes cant see 180,000 miles?

I understand the mirror model idea your going for, its a simple concept mirrors and used as an example because theyre easy to relate to and understand but definately not practical for doing anything like this. if your reflecting something back and forth that much your going to get all kinds of limits, the mirror will absorb some light, the air between the mirrors will scatter some ect.. I dont think shrinking an image and changing and bringing it back is going to change the way the speed of light works either.

And this can be done...just get a webcam.

lol was going to say
I look quite a ways into the past everytime I watch a movie

Well first of all, I don't understand what the difference would be between seeing the past on a mirror surface and seeing it on a monitor. We can easily record and reproduce images already.
Also, I think it would be much easier to slow light down and have less distance traveled, than create a million mirrors thousands of miles apart. Considering we've already managed to slow light down to 17 m/s, you could see a few seconds into the past with just a single mirror that is only like 20 meters away.

This post was edited by russian on Aug 15 2012 02:18pm

The moon is about 250,000 miles away. The Sun is 93,000,000 miles away. Andromeda (the nearest galaxy to our Milky way) is 14.6 quintillion miles away.

seeing in the past is quite easy if you make the technology availible today

the best method though is probably just big brothering the world

babby's first thought

take a picture. boom