Slashdot Mirror
Excursions at the Speed of Light
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."
G-force is caused by acceleration. Assuming you accelerate slowly enough, you can get up to $VERY_FAST without dying.
G force is dependent on acceleration, not velocity. If one were to be accelerated too quickly to the speed of light, you would likely not survive. But if one were to accelerate to the speed of light under livable circumstances, it would not rip your skin off. Once traveling at the speed of light, you will feel just like you feel when traveling in an airplane
Lightspeed is a simulator for velocities at c and below. Screenshots are available.
Illegal? Samir, This is America.
I have seem something similar to this before. Check out:
http://www.anu.edu.au/Physics/Searle/
and
http://www.anu.edu.au/Physics/Savage/TEE/
Very cool project - the screenshots posted by the parent comment show nicely that the Tübingen Project forgot to adjust the colors - due to the Doppler effect, colors change dramatically.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
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 :)
My UID is prime. Hah!
That's Newtonian. The relativistic acceleration equations are different. See this FAQ for the correct equations, which will tell you how long (in either proper or inertial time) it would take to reach a given speed, as measured by an inertial observer initially at rest with respect to the body -- with some calculations for 1 g acceleration.
(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.)
C'mon, surely someone else remembers the episode of Carl Sagan's series "Cosmos" where they did the relativistic motor scooter trick? In a small town in Italy, where the speed of light is only 40 km/hr (strictly enforced!) a young man leaves on a tour of the city at relativistic speeds, leaving his friend and younger brother behind. Sagan describes the effects of blue- and red-shifting, the contraction of the cyclist's length, and the dilation of time. It ends with the young man returning to the place he started, just a few minutes (in his frame of reference) after he left. Sadly, he finds all his friends gone, and only his once-younger brother, now an old man, still waiting for him.
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.
Velocity is a vector quantity, basically speed times a direction vector. If you turn, it takes a force to push you in the new direction. Since F=MA, that means that you are being accelerated. If you were to drive a car in a clockwise circle at a speed of 100 MPH, it would be constantly accelerated to the right, but its speed would remain 100 MPH. However the net velocity would be zero, as the net spatial displacement would be zero (at least every time you come back to the start point.)
And orbiting bodies continually lost speed? What kind of troll weed are you putting in your pipe?
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman