19 ms·
Very fast rocket
- _Microft 5y agoAlso check out the game "A Slower Speed of Light" [0] if you are interested in visualization of relativistic effects. It includes effects like Doppler shifting of colors, perceived warping of space and time dilation. Good luck at not getting nauseous. [0] http://gamelab.mit.edu/games/a-slower-speed-of-light/ http://gamelab.mit.edu/games/a-slower-speed-of-light/
- jeroenhd 5y agoWas about to post this. This demonstration helped me understand the abstract physics at high speeds better than any book ever did. I didn't suffer any motion sickness, but if there's a game that can induce it in you from just a monitor, this is probably that game.
- Uehreka 5y agoAlthough if you’re on macOS Catalina or higher, the game no longer runs. And since the team abandoned it without open sourcing it[0], it can’t be recompiled for 64-bit. [0] Although they did open source some of their scripts and shaders as a Unity plugin called OpenRelativity, which was cool.
- jridgewell 5y agoStrange, I'm on Catalina and it runs fine. I did have to override the security settings [1], but everything else was fine. [1]: https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/open-a-mac-app-from-an-unidentified-developer-mh40616/mac https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/open-a-mac-app-from...
- jayd16 5y agoWould be interesting to see a multiplayer version that handled multiple relativistic observers.
- gnarbarian 5y agoI'm not sure how that would work with time dilation.
- tshaddox 5y agoYou could make different player’s in-game clocks appear slower or faster, but you obviously couldn’t affect the players’ actual subjective clocks, so you obviously couldn’t do any of the interesting things like the twin paradox, unless the entire in-game simulation was sped up significantly and you could do something interesting with in-game characters aging at different rates.
- serf 5y ago'elite dangerous' offers a very rudimentary version of that.
- arendtio 5y agoJust tried it (Arch Linux AUR: assol). One thing I liked is the option to use de-saturated colors. Sadly, it crashed when I reached 99/100 orbs... It definitely is a funny game.
- riwsky 5y agoYet again, a bunch of web technologies trying to approach the speed of c
- splittingTimes 5y agoSo that means at 0.95c i would see stuff that is in periphery below or beside me, in the frontal of my vision? Is at 0.995c then every in front of me?
- throwaway2568 5y agoLooks nice, I used a more complicated version during undergrad for a physics lab. It was great as you could explore length contraction, time dilation etc, and also had toggles for enabling some of the really crazy relativistic effects. https://people.physics.anu.edu.au/~cms130/RTR/ https://people.physics.anu.edu.au/~cms130/RTR/ Turns out it relied on GPU acceleration at the time to work (even at low Res). https://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0701200 https://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0701200 Might be interesting for someone to port it to a browser version
- anderskaseorg 5y agoNo, the space being shown here remains entirely flat. There is length contraction and time dilation at play, but that’s a uniform effect. The reason the image appears distorted is because we have more time to catch up to light rays emitted from farther away. This visual phenomenon is called Terrell rotation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrell_rotation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrell_rotation It’s based entirely on special relativity—not to be confused with general relativity, which deals with curved spacetime in the presence of gravitational fields.
- dang 5y agoSubmitted title was "Website to observe how space is curved the closer you get to the speed of light". We got complaints about that, so have reverted to the web page's own title. "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- gpsx 5y agoSome of the funny effects seen here come not from relativity but from the finite time of propogation. In fact, relativity _reduces_ the effect of you see from time of propogation. An example is that objects seem to be curved, because it takes more time for the light from there to get to you, and you move in that time. With relativity, this apparent curvature is less.
- mattowen_uk 5y agoOK, so here's a question that I've never been able to find a clear answer for (that I understood)... Say I'm sitting on the bridge of a spaceship travelling N-times the speed of light. I'm facing forward. What do I see? Am I blinded because photons from far off stars are hitting my eyes at an increased rate? Also, if I look to the left and the right, and behind me? What do I see ? In Star Trek, it's all stripy-stars, and I'm sure that's not correct.
- kxrm 5y agoThat's a good question, I am naive to this as well. However my guess is that if you looked forward you would see a dilation effect. Looking backward, you would see the same, just reversed. If you could go faster than light then looking behind you would be darkness (since light can't catch you). However looking forward, could it be that normal light is dilated to such a degree that we change perspective and can see things normally not in our visual range (like Infrared)?
- z2210558 5y agoIIRC the light coming from in front of you gets blue shifted, each photon increasing in energy, and the count increases because of the geometric changes you see in the video (the angles in front seem to shrink). Light from the rear red shifts (each photon has less energy), and there are fewer as some of the (formerly incident) photons "rotated" to the front. (edit: typo) (edit: didn't read the question closely, this is about approaching c, not exceeding it)
- simonh 5y agoSince you can’t travel faster than light in continuous space time there is no way to answer this. At the speed of light relativistic distortions lead to a singularity, so bye bye spacetime. The one even faint possibility we know of, the Alcubier effect, puts you in a bubble of space time and warps that so it propagates at FTL speeds, but within that space time bubble you are stationary. You wouldn’t see anything outside the bubble though as it’s beyond an extreme distortion of space time that light cannot penetrate.
- 5y ago
- esoterae 5y agoWhy does the slider conflate position with velocity? Leave it at 0.95c for a minute, put it back to zero, then watch as your position is re-set back to 0. Subsequently slide it back to 0.95c, your position is magically fast-forwarded to your previous position, along with resumption of velocity.
- stevage 5y agoBecause it's hacky?
- Ono-Sendai 5y agoThat's what happens when you compute the displacement as velocity * total_time.
- xwdv 5y agoWhy stop at 0.95c? Why not just let it go even higher so we can see what would really happen in FTL travel
- techrat 5y agoBecause FTL travel is not possible, so there's no way to know what would 'really happen.'
- ordu 5y agoI think, divisions by zero would happen.
- rbanffy 5y agoOnly at c. Once you are beyond it (even though you can’t pass it), you’ll get squared imaginary numbers, however, which I’m sure would not be healthy for human passengers.
- alphabet9000 5y agoi cloned the repo earlier to see what would happen. difference between .95c and .999c is unremarkable. equal to and above 1 results in all of the geometry disappearing, just shows black.
- michaelsbradley 5y agoSomething I found very interesting when I learned about it several years ago: it's possible to formulate SR and GR with the Euclidean (++++) metric instead of the Minkowski (+---) or (-+++) metric. Such a formulation (there is a variety of them) is sometimes called Euclidean Relativity (ER). See: https://www.euclideanrelativity.com/ https://www.euclideanrelativity.com/ Some ER research is particularly fascinating to me, e.g. Montanus' work on Flat Space Gravitation: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10701-005-6482-0 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10701-005-6482-0 A new description of gravitational motion will be proposed. It is part of the proper time formulation of physics as presented on the IARD 2000 conference. According to this formulation the proper time of an object is taken as its fourth coordinate. As a consequence, one obtains a circular space–time diagram where distances are measured with the Euclidean metric. The relativistic factor turns out to be of simple goniometric origin. It further follows that the Lagrangian for gravitational dynamics does not require an interpretation in terms of curvature of space–time. The flat space model for gravitational dynamics leads to the correct predictions for the bending of light, the perihelion shift of Mercury and gravitational red-shift. The new theory is free of singularities.
- Metacelsus 5y agoWasn't there a Greg Egan science fiction book about this?
- Twisol 5y agoThree of them, in fact! The series is called "Orthogonal": http://www.gregegan.net/ORTHOGONAL/ORTHOGONAL.html http://www.gregegan.net/ORTHOGONAL/ORTHOGONAL.html
- wyager 5y agoA really excellent series if you like math and physics. It gets bad reviews because most readers aren’t looking for a physics text disguised as a novel. Personally, I love it.
- jiggawatts 5y ago
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dleslie 5y agoIs there a fragment shader for this?
- bufferoverflow 5y agoNeeds color shifts and brightness increase/decrease
- ryandrake 5y agoSeems to not work on Safari/macOS. Just shows a 3D rocket, a gray 3d grid, and a few check boxes. No apparent means to do anything with it. EDIT: Oh, the slider.
- Twirrim 5y agoSame here, Firefox/Windows edit: ohhh. You're supposed to move the slider at the bottom right. That wasn't at all obvious.
- TheRealNGenius 5y agoWow, that's pretty bad design. I didn't see that either.
- nayuki 5y agoMany nice visualizations of relativity from over a decade ago: https://www.spacetimetravel.org/ https://www.spacetimetravel.org/
- jackdaw12 5y agoReminds me of this from the 90s! http://www.adamauton.com/warp/ http://www.adamauton.com/warp/
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jcims 5y agoIf folks want to see a very fast rocket in real life, check out the Sprint ABM https://youtu.be/3dl9Ovwmnxw https://youtu.be/3dl9Ovwmnxw
- t8sr 5y agoSomewhat related, the relativistic rocket equation itself is pretty fascinating. I've written some code that lets one play around with it: https://github.com/the80srobot/gorocket https://github.com/the80srobot/gorocket It's only when you try simulating relativistic physics yourself that some points become apparent. For example, I didn't remember from school that all observers agree on acceleration, and in the first implementation I treated it as happening over time experienced by the accelerating frame. By having all of my unit tests spit out nonsense and figuring out what the problem was, it finally "clicked" for me. If I have a point (do I?) it is this: if you're trying to learn physics, I highly recommend trying to code some simple simulations yourself. It's amazing how much better one can understand stuff that way, than reading from a book.
- mattknox 5y agoHave you looked at SICM? (Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics, the far less popular half-sibling of the SICP) https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/structure-and-interpretation-classical-mechanics-second-edition https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/structure-and-interpretation-... -it has you derive classical mechanics, which is to say most() of Newtonian physics up to around 1900, by writing a giant pile of scheme that drives graphical simulations. () For a curious value of "most" that elides thermodynamics, electromagnetism, etc..