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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."
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.
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.
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/
Look, I've been through Tübingen at the speed of light, and it doesn't look anything like that!
eleven plus two / twelve plus one
All this does is attempt to simulate the visual distortion that one would perceive when traveling that fast. The videos look like you could be going 100 mph or whatever in terms of speed, but the distortion of the buildings seems to be what they're trying to get across here. The idea that you could have a long enough street lined with similar enough buildings to even perceive this distortion is beyond fantastical, so there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of point to this other than illustrating the notion that there is visual distortion. But I imagine what you would actually see would be much more of a blur.
Stand still, and let the rest of the universe move.
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)
or maybe that's brown bike shorts.
eww.
Thats one long block! The movie is 3 or 4 seconds long, so that is a 1,200,000 km street block.
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.
They are missing the blueshift you would encounter at that speed. However I guess they couldn't be accurate because wouldn't the frequency would shift to far above the ultraviolet quite quickly?
History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it - Sir Winston Churchill
"They put you in a driver's seat that both Armstrong the Astronaut and Armstrong the Cyclist would equally enjoy"
But what about Armstrong the overly stretchy action figure?
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It's just that yours is stupid.
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!
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.)
Ha, that's easy for a level 7 magic user to say! Some people simply don't have the high INT scores to understand the difference between speed and acceleration. That's why they're so BAD at using a bow and arrow, or even a sling (even level 1 wizards can use a sling hahaa). Anyway, after slaying this sweet dragon last week, I found like a million +2 INT hats. Maybe I should sell them and get rich then everyone would know the difference between acceleration and speed and you wouldn't have a reason to be so sad.
Btw, that was a hilarious email forward you sent me about "10 ways warriors are dumb". You should add a new one to the list 11) Warriors can't even name five flaws in Aristotle's physics!! haha So is your mom still mad or can we play at your house again on Tuesday?
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