Some thoughts on Light

Forgive me for my shortcomings in scientific knowledge.
I've thinking: does light contain images of everything that has ever happened?
Images of distant galaxies light years away is "preserved" in the light that travels from those places. So on Earth, could everything that ever happened be seen by figuring out how to "read" light that is "old"?
This is probably a stupid suggestion, but please be civil in telling me why this won't work.

Dassault Papillon: As I understand it based on reading popular science books but not really much formal science education: If you were to stand far enough away and still have an unobstructed view of earth, that should work. The issue is that you can't see light that's very far away without going back a great distance in time. Spacetime works like that.

Dassault Papillon: Yes and no. Yes, in the sense that quantum mechanics holds that information about physical systems is preserved, deterministically, in its wave function. No in the sense that light would not be the carrier of that information. As the light photons interact with other particles it would change those particles and itself be changed. The information is preserved, uniformly, but only in the sense that it is contained somewhere within the universe. It can be deformed to the point of being unrecognizable as far as the "original" light is concerned.

drafterman: Light functions through waves. Technically we can capture light to create images, but eventually the wave will simply project new images.
In short, your theory, while intresting, likely isn't true.

I'm open to more studying on the topic though. You can capture light in a room full of white prisms, but eventually the light would absorb, because it isn't a physical specimen that can be dissected.

Blackflag: ^To LL. One of you needs to get a profile pic

Gonna take over da' forums swag money...

Dassault Papillon: Stop trying to be the next Pinkie Pie...

Dassault Papillon: No. Unless you transport the memories into billions and billions of light years away, and give it a lot of light where it could shine, then perhaps billions of years later, we might know that we humans sent a galaxy into space for teh lelz. It won't work because the images from distant galaxies are far away, and it takes a long time for light to travel to earth from those galaxies. By the time the existence of that galaxy is known, the galaxy would be dead.