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relativity

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Simulation of motion/velocities from observers point of views

No license · updated 1 year ago

Relativity simulations

A couple small visualizations of relativistic phenomena.

Sim1

3 comoving observers seeing an object that moves at relativistic speeds. Shows the object, where each observer sees the object, and where each observer calculates (observs) the object to actually be

Sim2

Three cubes moving at relativistic speeds (.99C) including length contraction to demonstrate Terrell Rotation

About

These simulations came about because I couldn't get out of my head that we should be able to see objects moving faster than light even if nothing is actually travelling faster than C. However I was apparently asking the wrong question as any time I asked about observing faster than light motion people tend to assume you're talking about the relative velocity of some object and they'll say nothing moves faster than C and therefore no, you would not observe faster than light motion.

Observe, it turns out, is a very specific word when asking these kinds of questions, and even asking what you would "see" tends to have people thinking about observing and determining actual relative velocities. Maybe with an extra side note you'd see a blue shift.

It turns out we do see these superluminal speeds I thought we should see. They're optical illusions but we do see them. The proper term is apparent superluminal motion and once you know that it's easy to pull up sources about it. We see these superluminal speeds in jets from quasars and blazars. Wikipedia also has a page about it under (Superluminal Motion).

So these simulations are about interesting phenomena around relativistic speeds, not so much using it physics-wise