Seeing Through Time with Dr. John Mather | HowStuffWorks NOW

3/04/2016: What happened in the early days of the universe? How did the first stars and galaxies form? In just a few years, we’ll find the answers to these questions and more with the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope. We spoke with Senior Project Scientist and Nobel Laureate Dr. John Mather to learn more about how the JWST works, where it’s headed, and what we hope to find when it arrives.

music: ‘Summer Spliffs’ by Broke For Free

Special thanks to the entire team at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center for hosting our visit, to Bill Ochs, Dr. John Mather, Begoña Vila, Jody Davis and Dr. Stefanie Milam for sharing their time, knowledge and enthusiasm with us, to Laura Betz for managing our time on site, and to  Maggie Masetti for making sure the entire shoot ran smoothly and serving as science consultant.

VIDEO CLIPS
Voyager Reaches Interstellar Space
NASA Exploring Energy Infrared
NASA | WMAP--From the Archives
NASA | Turning Black Holes into Dark Matter Labs
Kepler - A Search for Habitable Planets
NASA | Asteroid Bennus Journey
NASA | Earth from Orbit 2014
An Unusual Planetary System
First Multi-Planet System Discovered by Kepler
NASA | Alien Atmospheres
NASAs Kepler Mission Discovers Its Smallest Habitable Zone Planets to Date
Europa: Ocean World
NASA | Fermi Provides New Insights on Dark Matter

Seeing Through Time with Dr. John Mather | HowStuffWorks NOW

[mrbloody]

we can see our planet grow up and the unanswered events that we have theories about

[uNkLeRaRa]

How do they know they are looking into the past and not the "future"? Would it not only be possible to see into the past if the big bang started at a single point? And we would have to know which direction to look in wouldn't we? And since the planets and stars around us in ALL directions are moving away from us, how do we know where that single point is?

[elfboi]

We might be at the dusk of civilisation. We've changed the planet so much that the biosphere is severely stressed, biodiversity is dropping at a fast rate, it has even been labelled the Sixth Extinction. If we survive as a species, we'll probably find ourselves on a planet that is a lot less comfortable than before, with a much less stable climate and much less productive ecosystems. The hunter-gatherer lifestyle can adapt to that, but civilisations can't.

[BariumCobaltNitrogn]

I can see "through" time by going outside at night.
Define seeing through time. And please don't let it be, "we can see light from stars, and it took a while for it to get here, so we see light that left the star before now." Re-runs. All those old stars we will see with the JWST are ALL gone. If you stood far enough away, you could see George Washington cross the Delaware. Or...you know.

Light takes time to travel, and after a while we see it. I find it very misleading when it is said that we can see back in time to millions of years ago with the implication that we can GO to that place and time. Although we might see dinosaurs, right?

For me, seeing "through" time would be seeing something right now a billion light years away as it is right now.