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I ran across an animation once that showed graphically the time it takes light to travel between the planets and the sun. It's weird, but light doesn't seem tha
by generalizations 4y ago
I ran across an animation once that showed graphically the time it takes light to travel between the planets and the sun. It's weird, but light doesn't seem that fast anymore.
- shultays 4y agoI feel like it is more like we cant comprehend how big and empty space is
- edbaskerville 4y agoThe thing that did for me is realizing that people on opposite sides of the United States can't play music together if it requires any rhythmic coordination, even with a true speed-of-light signal with no other sources of latency.
- aeonik 4y agojamtaba and ninjam are an open source solutions to this problem. They allow you to buffer everyone's playing, at a user specified interval, then replays the last measure of music to everyone. It's definitely not the same as live playing, but it's still pretty fun, and actually forces you to get creative on different ways. https://jamtaba-music-web-site.appspot.com/ https://jamtaba-music-web-site.appspot.com/
- Aeolun 4y agoHow does that work for the one playing ahead of everyone else? He just doesn’t hear anything? Or he hears his own music from 1 second ago? Or worse, other people’s music from 1 second ago.
- rocqua 4y agoI think everyone hears everyone else playing x milliseconds ago? Where x is probably decided based on the beat. The weird side-effects are why I guess the parent said that "it's still pretty fun, and actually forces you to get creative on different ways."
- dizhn 4y agoYou have to think in bars not seconds.I believe you hear your own playing in near real time and is overlayed on the bars coming from others. It works pretty well with well structured music like the blues. You probably couldn't play well if the piece was changing tempo or key all the time.
- edbaskerville 4y agoInteresting! Presumably last 12 measures if you're playing a 12-bar blues, etc. Big downside is you're stuck playing to a metronome, which would be enough for me to skip it, but it depends on the kind of music you're playing. I could imagine that if the music is rhythmically slow and vague and improvised, big latencies are OK, and actually might yield some pretty interesting creative results. Another model I've thought about is to structure players in a rooted DAG, and players can hear only people upstream of them. E.g., you could build an orchestra by having a conductor and section leaders in a room together (or at within very low latency of each other). Other players could hear the leaders and play along, and then an audience could hear everyone. You could also do something more complicated like build things out in linear or power-of-2 layers, where each layer can hear everything upstream of it, and therefore many players would get a partial sense of the orchestral effect. This could work nicely for improvised music, too, with causality preserved.
- sklopi 4y agoYou could have a metronome in the middle
- ZoomZoomZoom 4y agoIt is actually the way to go with client-server programs, such as Jamulus. People from distant locations try to chose/run a server closer to their geographical (or, more properly, with a correction on how the fiber runs) middlepoint.
- ineedasername 4y agoThe speed of light has really not kept pace with Moore's Law. Engineers have focused overly much on clock speed and transistor density and completely ignored C, and it's really beginning to show.
- orzig 4y agoAnother consequence of our society’s reduced investment in fundamental physics - instead we go ether.
- AnimalMuppet 4y agoI recently read a science fiction short story on reddit, where humans had developed faster-than-light communication because they needed to reduce lag in networked games.
- scarmig 4y agoPerhaps the solution is more on the bioengineering side of things: make smaller people so they can fit in smaller rooms.
- ineedasername 4y agoThat would have a nice side benefit or making space exploration much more economical. Faster too if you can bioengineer higher G resistance at the same time. Maybe someday the outer planets will be colonized by tiny humans measured in millimeters, with 125mm humans darting around the various moons shot out of repurposed tank canons, all laughing at the slow giants stuck down the gravity well on Earth.
- somenameforme 4y agoThe much more remarkable thing is to consider that that speed of light is also the speed of causality itself. It takes light from the sun about 8 minutes to reach Earth. If the sun suddenly disappeared, we'd still see it shining brightly in the sky, and the Earth would continue revolving around it - all for another 8 minutes until reality finally caught up to us. So we're already computing at a rate on the verge of the speed of reality itself. It's interesting to consider this paired against how technologically primitive we ostensibly must be, given that digital computers didn't even exist 90 years ago.
- CMCDragonkai 4y agoIs the speed of light really the speed of causality? Would the effect of gravity (the lack of) affect Earth earlier than us perceiving the lack of light.
- d110af5ccf 4y agoNope. All physical effects are bounded by the speed of light. (As far as anyone knows, anyway.) The only weird one is quantum entanglement, but even then information transfer doesn't travel faster than light and that's about all I know on that subject.
- rl3 4y ago>The only weird one is quantum entanglement, but even then information transfer doesn't travel faster than light ... For anyone wondering why that is, I found this explanation super interesting: https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2020/01/02/no-we-still-cant-use-quantum-entanglement-to-communicate-faster-than-light/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2020/01/02/no-w...
- drewtato 4y agoI also liked this explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7jctqKsUMA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7jctqKsUMA In short, the only information you gain is about the outcome of the other side's measurement. They cannot introduce information into the particle, and thus can't transmit information. The only thing you learn is what you already knew: the other particle had a 50% chance of being in one state or another, with the added fact that it's now correlated to your particle with a 75% (depending on experiment) chance. This is information that didn't exist until that moment, so it couldn't have been sent out and reach you before you measure your particle, which would inform you with 75% certainty how your particle would act and break causality.
- generalizations 4y agoEdit: found it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQUwHdSAhmw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQUwHdSAhmw
- booleandilemma 4y agoI saw that exact animation you're talking about and my first thought was "there's no way that's the fastest thing in the universe."