Excursions at the Speed of Light 360
D4C5CE writes "S/F fans can finally find out what you really get to see at relativistic velocity, and tourists are one step closer to "doing Europe in a day" in these amazing Space Time Travel simulations of the Theoretical Astrophysics & Computational Physics department at the Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics Tübingen. They put you in a driver's seat that both Armstrong the Astronaut and Armstrong the Cyclist would equally enjoy, in simulators built to ride a bike at the speed of light."
Good Further reading.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Good Further reading.... (Score:3, Funny)
Brian Greene defeats the evil dragon of ignorance at the end, but emphatically, does not get the lady.
Re:Caution: Chinese Weaponization of Space (Score:3, Insightful)
Why does this troll keep showing up? The Chinese don't have the resources to compete with the US. They've attempted manned space travel several times (even outright copying the Dynasoar design) and every time have had to cut it because of the cost. For now, I wouldn't worry too much about the Chinese one-upping the US on their own technology. Start worry
Re:Good Further reading.... (Score:2)
Re:Good Further reading.... (Score:2, Interesting)
Bringing us back on topic, it was a PBS television series as well, and included one show with light speed visualizations at the same (or better) quality than linked to in the article.
And that was 25 years ago.
Re:Good Further reading.... (Score:2)
All this was taken out for the 6 hour version of Cosmos reshown on Turner broadcasting. If you look fo
Re:Good Further reading.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Very good. As the title suggests, more on more things, developments in chemistry, biology, geology, physics, et al and Bryson keeps it very interesting. Don't bother with the abridged audiobook though (the unabridged is read by the author and is basicallly word for word)
G forces (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:G forces (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Welcome to happy vector land! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Welcome to happy vector land! (Score:5, Informative)
And orbiting bodies continually lost speed? What kind of troll weed are you putting in your pipe?
Re:G forces (Score:5, Informative)
Re:G forces (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:G forces (Score:5, Funny)
Ha, that's easy for a level 7 magic user to say! Some people simply don't have the high INT scores to understand the difference between speed and acceleration. That's why they're so BAD at using a bow and arrow, or even a sling (even level 1 wizards can use a sling hahaa). Anyway, after slaying this sweet dragon last week, I found like a million +2 INT hats. Maybe I should sell them and get rich then everyone would know the difference between acceleration and speed and you wouldn't have a reason to be so sad.
Btw, that was a hilarious email forward you sent me about "10 ways warriors are dumb". You should add a new one to the list 11) Warriors can't even name five flaws in Aristotle's physics!! haha So is your mom still mad or can we play at your house again on Tuesday?
Re:G forces (Score:4, Funny)
Re:G forces (Score:5, Informative)
300000000/50 = 6000000 seconds, or about 70 days.
Deceleration would require the same amount of time. So the Tübingen experience would be a 140-day-not-very-pleasent-5-G bike ride :)
Re:G forces (Score:2, Informative)
Relativistic G forces (Score:5, Informative)
(For instance, to reach 0.77c requires 1 year of subjective time or 1.19 years of objective time; for 0.97c, it's 2 years subjective, 3.75 years objective; for 0.99999999996c it's 12 years subjective, 113,243 years objective.)
Re:G forces (Score:2)
Re:G forces (Score:4, Informative)
Once at the speed of light (Score:2)
Re:G forces (Score:5, Funny)
Re:G forces (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:G forces (Score:2)
Re:G forces (Score:2)
Re:G forces (Score:2)
Re:G forces (Score:5, Funny)
Re:G forces (Score:2)
The nerds have already seen (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The nerds have already seen (Score:2)
Re:The nerds have already seen (Score:2)
Re:The nerds have already seen (Score:2)
Re:The nerds have already seen (Score:3, Informative)
You cannot accelerate a mass > 0 beyond c.
Relativity does not prohibit travelling FTL, it just prohibits getting there from a speed < c. A subtle, but important distinction.
Tübingen project got the colors wrong (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Tübingen project got the colors wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Tübingen project got the colors wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course, far blue carries less information than far red.
Still, it'd be cool to see the effect of ultraviolet being shifted through the visible spectrum.
Apply Theory of Relativity to the Slashdot Effect (Score:2, Funny)
What? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:What? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:What? (Score:4, Interesting)
This has been done before (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.anu.edu.au/Physics/Searle/ [anu.edu.au]
and
http://www.anu.edu.au/Physics/Savage/TEE/ [anu.edu.au]
Even earlier... (Score:3, Informative)
I can't find the brochure online (this was pre-WWW), but I think the stills came from this paper [acm.org], from 1990.
Not that I think that this sort of thing is redundant. As technology advances, this is the type of visualization that's worth repeating on new hardware and new software.
k.
No way. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:No way. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:No way. (Score:2)
Length contraction? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Length contraction? (Score:3, Interesting)
How long? (Score:3, Insightful)
Looking backwards would be kinda sweet though, if it didn't blind you immediately.
Re:How long? (Score:3, Insightful)
Looking forward.. now thats a different story.
Re:How long? (Score:2)
Looking forward.. now thats a different story.
I was thinking at near but below light-speed, basically a very large number of sources in the distance having their light reach you all at roughly the same time. Like a sonic boom, but with light. In the last couple of minutes I've swung from agreeing with you to disagreeing, and retyped this comment
Re:How long? (Score:3, Interesting)
If you are a human, eventually the things in front of you will be blueshifted out of the visible spectrum, and the back will be redshifted, so everything will go 'dark' (light non visible).
The direction of the shift will depend which way you are facing. Also, bear in mind that although the human-visible spectrum will be shifted out of the human-visible range, depending on your direction, one side of the human-invisible spectrum
Re:How long? (Score:2)
Re:How long? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:How long? (Score:2)
Imagine travelling from Earth to Alpha Centauri at
In this second case you would be shading the Earth for 400 years, so you are absorbing the photons that the Earth would absorb for the next 400 (or so) years during the course of 400 of your years (assuming the photons coming parallel, but whatever).
In the first case you would be shading the earth for 4
Re:How long? (Score:2)
Perhaps someone else can.
p
Re:How long? (Score:4, Funny)
First of all, it's near lightspeed.
More importantly, they simulated light moving at 30km/h rather than 300km/s. Fortunately this had no effect on the real speed of light, so you're free to continue driving at highway speeds. Good thing too, because it would add a whole new dimension to traffic violations.
"Your honor, I literally couldn't see him until after we collided."
"$500 fine for exceeding the speed of light."
"Your honor, I didn't realize.. I thought I was just drunk!"
oblig. Red Dwarf! (Score:5, Funny)
or maybe that's brown bike shorts.
eww.
Re:oblig. Red Dwarf! (Score:2)
Anyone got an idea what's going on here? (Score:2)
Re:Anyone got an idea what's going on here? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Anyone got an idea what's going on here? (Score:4, Interesting)
See light travels at the speed of light. You cant travel faster, or even AT the speed of light.
But if youre zipping by an object that emits light, and its light doesnt travel in the same direction as you, its speed component in that direction is also slower than the speed of light, and you can catch up and see the object after you're past it.
Lets try that again.
Imagine youre on a bike, zipping past a lamppost. The light the lamppost emits travels in all directions. Now take the photos that are emitted in the same direction youre going, at the same time that youre just crossing the lamppost... now youre travelling parallel to that photon, although it beats you in speed.
However, if the lamppost was say 10m away from you when you zipped past, the photon you'd see is the photon the lamp emits not in the same direction youre travelling, but slightly towards you. If youre travelling north, the photon is travelling northwest, towards you. After youve crossed the lamppost, some distance later, the photon reaches you, because it had to travel a bigger distance, going in your travel direction (north) as well as towards you (west), and we all know the hypotenuse is longer than the base or height.If you travelled faster than the photon's north speed component, you'll see greater than 180 degrees around you... but never 360.
Thank you. (Score:2)
(Although I'm sure it helps that I'm well past tipsy as I type this.)
I Have Seen This (Score:3, Funny)
Light speed? (Score:4, Funny)
Uh, what about the Dopler effect? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Uh, what about the Dopler effect? (Score:3, Interesting)
And yes, pushing several hundred watts per square meter of visible light into the UV range would result in a terrible sunburn.
Re:Uh, what about the Dopler effect? (Score:2)
Traffic Lights.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Tubingen? (Score:4, Funny)
No blueshift (Score:5, Interesting)
They are missing the blueshift you would encounter at that speed. However I guess they couldn't be accurate because wouldn't the frequency would shift to far above the ultraviolet quite quickly?
Re:No blueshift (Score:2)
Yep--although that could be pretty cool, too. If we set aside the rapid blinding due to exposure to intense ultraviolet (and x-rays, and gammas, as you get to higher velocities) the view would be very interesting. The visible light portion of the spectrum would still be just fine off to the sides. There would be a ring of "normal" view perpendicular to the direction of your mo
Mr. Tompkins in Wonderland (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Mr. Tompkins in Wonderland (Score:3, Informative)
But, but.. (Score:5, Funny)
But what about Armstrong the overly stretchy action figure?
Re:But, but.. (Score:2)
In Stretch Armstrong's frame of reference, it's everyone else who's stretching madly!
Through the city at the speed of light (Score:2)
OK, read the article.
The Through the city at the speed of light [spacetimetravel.org] demo is all very lens-effect-y, but there's no account of colour-shift. As you get faster the approaching wavelengths will shorten (Blue Shift) until you get fast enough that all (normally) visible light shifts up and out of our acuity.
Everything you'd see would be sub-infrared shifted into your spectrum, and this doesn't seem to take that into account.
Speed of Light? (Score:2)
--
All your speed is belongs to us.
Re:Speed of Light? (Score:2)
Otherwise, it's a bit bulky to say "E=m(something which is a dependent of the medium it travels in)^2".
Of course, put light into a Bose-Einstein Condensate, and you could cycle faster than it...
Speed of light IS a constant. (Score:4, Informative)
Light's speed is a constant, c. It's the speed of absorbtion and reemission that changes it's apparent speed through substances.
Not quite (Score:3, Informative)
Normally we use the words absorbtion and re-emission to refer to electron energy-level transitions within the molecule: photons are absorbed and promote electrons to higher energy levels; then, at a somewhat random time and in a somewhat random direction (not uniformly), electrons drop to lower energy levels and re-emit photons. (Note that these transitions aren't instantaneous, nor entirely well defined in time, but we call them quantum events anyway).
A notable effect of complete absorbtion and re-emiss
Cosmos (Score:5, Informative)
I don't know why, but the bittersweet reunion of the two brothers, as well as the story of the late Wolf Vishniac in the "Blues for a Red Planet" episode, both make me cry.
Re:Cosmos (Score:3, Insightful)
I installed it, and it works! (Score:3, Funny)
Wow!! the effects of time/spped of light being made clear!
Now I don't need to subscribe the
Re:Well (Score:2)
Hint (Score:3, Informative)
MOD PARENT IGNORANT (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Only one problem... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Only one problem... (Score:3, Funny)
Scientists use words like chess masters use pawns; saying something's "just a theory" tends to have roughly the same effect on their mental state as kicking the board over.
videos (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:videos (Score:3, Informative)
Either that or the buildings and roads are so many thousands of times bigger than real life, in which case you would again see what the video shows.
Alternatively, you could set the speed of light very slow, and you would see the same effect even if you travelled at only 100mph and with normal sized buildings and roads.
I
Re:videos (Score:2)
Re:Sounds like a wonderful experience... (Score:5, Insightful)
All this is, of course, assuming Einstein was right (and I think some experiment somewhere proved these effects to be correct)
Re:Sounds like a wonderful experience... (Score:2)
Re:Sounds like a wonderful experience... (Score:3, Interesting)
Which leads to the observation that you could never stop going the speed of light, because when you decide to hit the brakes X seconds later, you would have traveled an infinite distance. Where would you end up? (Never mind the problem of having to dissipate infinite energy)
Re:Sounds like a wonderful experience... (Score:2)
Re:Sounds like a wonderful experience... (Score:3, Informative)
The really interesting trips occur when you're travelling very near the speed of light, not at the speed of light.
In summary: Mov
Re:Sounds like a wonderful experience... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Sounds like a wonderful experience... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Sounds like a wonderful experience... (Score:3, Informative)
Where v is your speed, c is the speed of light, t is the time that passes for someone at rest, and t' is the time that passes for you. If you plug a number in for the speed, say 30 kilometers meters per second (67k miles per hour) You would still be talking about a very small difference. Driving in your car at 80 Miles per hour would make the bottom of the fraction about equal to 1, meaning you wouldn't see any detectable difference.
Re:Sounds like a wonderful experience... (Score:5, Insightful)
But matter can't travel that fast, only things without mass. So, there is the interesting question of what you have that you would call a "bike" or "you".
Physics does not break at the speed of light, but intuitive physics is dead. Relativity is a strain on it at any high speed but just forget lightspeed.
(As I always do when this topic comes up, if you want a crack at understanding this stuff for real, try Reflections on Relativity [mathpages.com], free online.)