Theory of Relativity: A Concept Explored

It's quite often I ponder the world; that is to say, it's quite often I ponder the mechanisms and purposes behind the world's many processes. However, today in my American history class, we were made to read an excerpt from a book about Einstein's Theory of Relativity. This got me thinking about abstract concepts of time, light, sound, and waves; these concepts, except time, we have just begun to study in physics.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with Einstein's Theory of Relativity, it essentially changed the world's views on the space-time continuum. In a nutshell, it states that relative to the human eye, light is moving at incomprehensibly fast speeds, thus allowing us to see. Each colour that is in the visible light spectrum is a different wavelength: red is between 600-800 micrometres, purple is about 400 micrometres and so on. Since each wave has a wavelength and speed of the wave's reflection depends on the medium of the wave's travel (usually air, sometimes water), the colours we actually see are just reflected light waves.

In other words, what the eye sees each second is a reflection of light off of an object. Every time you see something changing before your eyes, what you're really seeing is a different reflection of light waves off of an object.

This is where Einstein's theory gets extremely theoretical and extremely advanced. The estimated speed of light in air 299,792,458 metres per second. Each second that a purple shirt is lying on a sidewalk, that shirt's colour will travel 299,792,458 metres at a wavelength of 400 micrometres. If, and that's a BIG "if" we were somehow able to create a ship that could travel faster than that speed, theoretically we would be able to time travel.

Now I know you're probably thinking, WHAT?! How could that possibly mean you can time travel? Think about it: How can you be positive that an event is taking place? By seeing said event, obviously. What happens if you're moving faster than the light of the event that you're supposed to be seeing? You are ahead of the event itself in terms of the space-time continuum.

Hopefully if you've reached this point, you somewhat understood what I was trying to explain. Having explained the theoretic possibility of time travel, I leave you all with one simple question that I've been pondering all day:

If you're moving faster than light, what DO you see?