> I saw something about when you travel near speed of light, lengths appear to contract "Appear" in this context, though, doesn't mean "what you actually see".

> I saw something about when you travel near speed of light, lengths appear to contract "Appear" in this context, though, doesn't mean "what you actually see". What you actually see is an apparent rotation of an object moving by you at relativistic speed. This is called Penrose-Terrell rotation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrell_rotation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrell_rotation Note also that the effect is only along the direction of relative motion; appearances transverse to the relative motion are unchanged. > Maybe the lights becoming lines is just based on long exposure in photography of moving lights. I think the "lights becoming lines" in sci-fi depictions is based on a Newtonian picture of what things would look like if you were moving through a space filled with stars at a speed much faster than light. Which of course has nothing to do with actual physics as we understand it today.