Jesus, no wonder most people are confused by physics...it's not often when you can fit something longer than a barn inside it without bending itadamnieman wrote:t00fri wrote:The much harder (but feasible part) concerns the distortions of the field of view of the observer as well as the (Doppler) shifts in colors. The whole 3d geometrical structures will be distorted depending on direction and value of the observer speed. This has massive implications on the rendering of almost everything within Celestia. Another consideration is optimized coding efficiency in order to avoid slowing down effects...
If it could be done, it would be a fantastic teaching aid (as I'm sure Frank would attest). Teachers could populate a patch of empty space with trains, barns and grids (the staples of special relativity education) and let their students experience relativistic effects for themselves. Perhaps the value of the speed of light could be modified by the user to experiment with more managable values. In the Mr Tompkins books, George Gamow imagines what it would be like to cycle down the street if the speed of light was just 20mph or so.
(Barns are used in problems involving Lorentz contraction. You run, at relativistic speed, through a barn with a door at each end holding a pole that is longer than the barn itself. As soon as the end of the pole reaches the door it is opened, and as soon as the other end of the pole crosses the threshold the door is closed. For a moment from the barn's reference frame, both doors are closed simultaneously. Thus the pole, which we know is longer than the barn, fits into it. When we try this from the pole's reference frame, the two doors are never simultaneously closed
. )
Adam
