What the world would look like if light traveled slowly (interactive simulation)

http://realtimerelativity.org/downloads.html

by idlewords • 17 years ago

10 12 17 years ago

brtzsnr• 17 years ago

No linux version?

jws• 17 years ago

Maybe just as well. On the Mac version it seizes the cursor so you can't get to the menu bar and won't quit with Command-Q despite flashing the menu to say "Yeah, I know you want out. Piss on you.

If the UI is that impolite on the machine known as the "fairy princess of user interface", then on Linux it would probably leave smelly food in your fridge and reorder your DVD collection.

mynameishere• 17 years ago

dll errors under windows. Oh well. Let's hear it for shit engineering.

johngunderman• 17 years ago

Attempting to run it under wine ran into an unhandled exception :( Does anyone have a video they could post of this app in action?

RiderOfGiraffes• 17 years ago

It's Mr Tompkins!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr_Tompkins

derefr2• 17 years ago

Light travels "as fast as it can." If light travelled slowly, then, by the momentum equation of special relativity, we'd still ramp our energy limits long before we saw this sort of stuff. In fact, if things took so much more energy to move about, macro-scale creatures such as ourselves would probably not have developed.

I think the author meant "what if light travelled at only a fraction of the speed it physically could?" which is a much more ridiculous question, but with even more interesting implications, especially if you don't also scale down the speed of gravitational transmission et all to match.

nopassrecover2• 17 years ago

I remember looking into the question of gravitation transmission before. As far as I could amatueurly determine, gravitational transmission is an unanswered question. This is to say, if the sun "dissapeared" would the Earth feel it straight away (because spacetime had been altered) or would it take as long as the time for light to reach us because gravitrons (if they exist) could only travel as fast as the speed of light?

I'm aware of the whole limit on information transmission so I assume the latter, but I thought it was still unanswered.

derefr2• 17 years ago

I think the real problem with that question is deciding exactly what you mean by "disappear." If you blow the sun up, it still has all its mass, it's just spreading apart, and the effect this has on Earth can be graphed continuously. Likewise if you just move it somewhere else really fast (because you can't move it faster-than-light.) If you convert it completely into energy, by the mass-energy equation, it still has all its mass.

Thinking about gravity becomes a lot simpler when you realize that every one of those particles of the Sun is quantum-entangled with all the particles of the Earth. If you want to "remove" the Sun, you have to decide what that means for the decoherence of the configuration subspace consisting of (what was previously) Sun + Earth.

Configurations only evolve toward more definite subsections of themselves, not completely "new," remote amplitudes. Also, as far as we can tell, decoherence is computable from the completely local neighborhood of the amplitude-mass in question. Thus, gravitational transmission has to take some amount of time, in the same way that one domino can't knock down another across the room instead of going through the dominos in-between.

The interesting thing is that some of the particles of the Earth (analogously, the intermediate dominos) would be immediately affected—but it would take Au/C before enough of them were affected that that decoherence would become detectable.

dennisgorelik• 17 years ago

Why does it require installation? Do they know that YouTube is available for years already?

idlewords• 17 years ago

It's an interactive simulation, like the title says. You can fly around a cityscape at speeds approaching c.

chrischen• 17 years ago

I think the purpose of this application is to teach the theory of relativity and show what it would feel like if matter (the space ship) could travel at the speed of light. Of course the only way to do this is if the speed of light was slower, and not the max speed of the universe. I guess you'll get to see how buildings will compress, and time will slow down.

I just happened to be on Windows 7 64 bit on boot camp on my mac and it didn't work. Required some dll file called d3dx9_37.dll. So I downloaded it and put it into windows system folder and it ran.

It's pretty trippy. It's like at 3d game where you control a spacecraft except when you start moving forward it's like you're on drugs.

What the world would look like if light traveled slowly (interactive simulation)

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