Chuft-Captain wrote:t00fri wrote:...
How about convincing me that there is some real physics behind that stuff. You know that Celestia is NOT a relative of StarTrek and friends.
Bye Fridger
Travel / Navigation in Celestia has never been based on real physics... case in point: the G key
I must disagree here. Real physics does not always imply "Reality". Real physics however requires logical and algorithmical consistency!
That's what the G key has!
The observer in Celestia is a concept that is absolutely standard in theoretical physics: in more standard wording, the observer acts as a 'test particle' that --as usual-- is not considered to be part of the dynamical system itself. I.e. the 'test particle' is not really subject to the same laws as the dynamical system. It just probes what is going on. Not more not less.
How the 'test particle' is to be realized, depends on the dynamics under consideration. So for example, we can imagine our observer /massless/ in order to decouple her from the gravitational action that she is watching for us
. In the same sense the Celestia observer is able to travel at a speed exceeding the speed of light. She is NOT an active part of this Universe or subject to it's physical laws. Etc...
According to the laws of Quantum Mechanics, we know of course that such a total decoupling of an observing device from the system of interest is strictly impossible. But in an approximate sense, this is very well a consistent approach.
Perhaps one simple example of the idea underlying all this:
Suppose we want to measure the temperature of the water in a /big/ container with a thermometer (our 'test particle'=observer) . Surely there will always be heat exchange between the thermometer and the system, once the device is entered into the water. But in this case it is /physically/ very well motivated to treat the thermometer as totally decoupled from the big pot of water...
Bye Fridger