Riding light (video)

[ffutures]

Interesting demonstration of what travelling at lightspeed would really mean, when compared to the size of the universe. It starts at the sun; due to time constraints it ends a little past Jupiter.

http://vimeo.com/117815404

[Wildeblood]

I've taken liberties with certain things like the alignment of planets and asteroids, as well as ignoring the laws of relativity concerning what a photon actually "sees" or how time is experienced at the speed of light, but overall I've kept the size and distances of all the objects as accurate as possible. I also decided to end the animation just past Jupiter as I wanted to keep the running length below an hour.

That rather negates the whole exercise, IMHO. A photon doesn't travel, it connects two points in spacetime and "experiences" neither space nor time (nor any view of/interaction with the outside universe). Photons are, in effect, little wormholes moving a tiny amount of energy from one point to another. Whether any object more massive than a photon can travel at light speed is speculative, but if it could, the view out the window would look nothing like that video.

(Ya know, if we could change the star colours in real time in Oolite, we could implement blue/red shifting to remind players whether they were looking forward or aft.)

[spud42]

interesting but i'm afraid i torused between encounters... lol

masslock Jupiter ahead.....


i suppose that technically if we were at light speed we would be traveling with all the photons and therefore none of them could enter our eyes and stimulate the optic nerve........ we wouldn't see anything.

[Smivs]

Scientifically dubious for sure, but quite a nice way to illustrate the point that space is BIG.
So big in fact I didn't even make it to Earth - I got bored after Venus and quit

[Fatleaf]

I'm with the Friendly Gourd here. But we have to remember the purpose of the video before being too harsh with the criticism.

This animation illustrates, in realtime, the journey of a photon of light emitted from the surface of the sun and traveling across a portion of the solar system, from a human perspective.

So it is just a basic illustration just to prove size. Looking at it from that view point I think he has done very well.

[spud42]

0h yes i agree it was a good way to illustrate the size of the solar system and i did enjoy it but as i said i skipped a bit and jumped ahead to 30sec prior to each flyby ....

[SteveKing]

...i skipped a bit and jumped ahead to 30sec prior to each flyby ....

Hyperspace

[ffutures]

And another "space is big" demo, this time showing the solar system to a scale where the moon is one pixel wide, described as a "tediously accurate model of the solar system"

http://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pix ... ystem.html