If before 1844 (the year when telegraph was first inaugurated and publicly used) a king receives a report on the situation on a battlefield 1000 km away, then by the time the king reads the report, the situation on the battlefield may have a completely different flow. For the king, the “live” situation is what the report consists of because no earlier information could have been available. In order for the king to be well-informed many messengers carrying information should leave the battlefield with a few hours in between. In this case, the king would have been better informed since within the interval of time from when an event occurred up to the moment when the king read the report on it, there would be multiple reports which carry very different information about the situation on the battlefield which could make the king angry or rejoice. So, as one can notice, the quality of information would increase if messengers had greater speed and frequency.
Is live broadcasting really “live”?
Today, messengers of public events do not travel by horse or train; but thanks to the technological devices, the information travels at the speed of light. In such cases, the broadcast operators state that the information is provided directly or “live”. But what is a “live” broadcast really, if we judge from physics perspective? When we say that we are following an event through a live broadcast, in physics it means that we are watching the event through the fastest possible messenger made available by today`s technology. In other words, we can never see an event which happens at another place at the moment in which it happened. This is so because the messenger which informs us (made of material and material only) needs a certain interval of time to reach its target – however fast the messenger is and however short is the road in which he carries the information. When we see that an object at a distance 3 m away changed its color, then this happened 10 ns (10 nano seconds) ago.
The present for us happens only in us; just inside our brain! All that happens in our surroundings has happened before. How much earlier it happened, depends on where it happened and with what kind of messenger we found out that it happened, because all messengers need time to carry the information.
