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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."
It's a little sad that most people still don't understand the difference between speed and acceleration. When I first read about the Scientific Revolution as a kid, the writer spent a lot of time sneering at medieval scholars who stubornly stuck to Aristotle's physics despite all the experimental evidence showing that it was wrong. But as far as most people are concerned (including the script writers on Star Trek) Aristotle has never been debunked.
That's wrong...Time would pass normally for you. You would think at a slower speed (the same speed you're moving) so you wouldn't notice a difference. When you got off the bike, however, much more time would have passed for everyone else than you.
All this is, of course, assuming Einstein was right (and I think some experiment somewhere proved these effects to be correct)
Well, at the speed of light... yes, things going at the speed of light experience nothing that can be called the progression of time.
But matter can't travel that fast, only things without mass. So, there is the interesting question of what you have that you would call a "bike" or "you".
Physics does not break at the speed of light, but intuitive physics is dead. Relativity is a strain on it at any high speed but just forget lightspeed.
(As I always do when this topic comes up, if you want a crack at understanding this stuff for real, try Reflections on Relativity, free online.)
I doubt it was a matter of forgetting; it's much more likely that they decided including the frequency shift would detract from the simulation. Visible light covers a comparatively narrow spectrum, from 700 to 400nm, and at the velocities they're covering any visible-light emissions would have shifted completely out of that band; at a fairly modest velocity like v=.8c, the doppler effect already produces a frequency shift of 3x, carrying a 400nm wavelength all the way up to 1200nm. I put together a good chunk of the doppler-shift portion of Dr. Ping-Kang Hsiung's simulation of these visual effects back in the early 90s (though I'm not among that paper's authors), and getting it to look interesting was far and away the most difficult part of the simulation.