Relativity Park: Walking Speed of Light

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📂 **Category**:

📌 **What You’ll Learn**:

Relativity Park: Walking Speed of Light

Your velocity

0.00km/h

β: v / c: 0.0000
γ: Lorentz factor: 1.000
Lengths ahead: × 1.0000

Elapsed

Your watch: 0:00.0
World clock: 0:00.0

Galilean view (aberration off)

Arrows / W A S D: accelerate
Mouse: look
Space: stop

L G C B: toggle effects
R: reset

Light is slow here

In this park, the speed of light is 5 kilometers per hour — a brisk walk.
Just like in the real world, the speed of light is not attainable, only approachable asymptotically.
The more you speed up, the more relativistic effects will become apparent:
length contraction, time dilation, Terrell rotation, etc. The Doppler effect of light
also becomes apparent, with objects in front of you blueshifted, objects behind you
redshifted, and transverse Doppler effects visible on objects in motion.

Click to look around

Field guide

All of the motion effects you see are physically accurate, in a world where the speed of light
is greatly reduced, so it can be observed more easily on human scales.

Controls

W A S Daccelerate

↑ ↓ ← →accelerate

Mouselook around

Spacestop

Q drop / E rise

Rreturn to start

Tabsettings

Escrelease mouse

Effects

Play around with what effect causes which phenomenon to be observed.

Llight-travel delay

Gaberration & contraction

CDoppler color

Brelativistic beaming

Things to try

Accelerate by pressing the Up arrow. Your field of view begins to condense
in the direction you are traveling, and becomes blueshifted. If you look
behind you by using your mouse to turn, that field of view is redshifted
and stretched out. This is relativistic aberration. Press Space
to stop any motion, and observe how the field of view returns to normal.
The lamp posts all flash once per second of world time. Move toward a lamp
and the flashing speeds up; move away and it slows down. Also observe the timers
labeled “Your watch” and “World clock”, and see time dilation in effect.
The Ferris wheel and carousel cars move at 75% of the speed of light.
They are contracted by their own motion, and you see each one at a different moment in its trip
around the circle. As the cars move around, you can see the effects of relativistic
contraction and Terrell rotation.
The shuttle near the end of the corridor runs back and forth, also attaining a speed
of 75% of the speed of light. Notice how it also contracts and undergoes Terrell rotation as it moves.

What’s NOT accurate

Obviously a Ferris wheel spinning at relativistic speeds would fly apart, and if you travel through
the atmosphere at relativistic speeds, you would be vaporized instantly. Even if you travel near
the speed of light in interstellar space, you would be cooked by the cosmic microwave background radiation
blueshifted to gamma rays.
The rendering of blueshifts and redshifts is a rough approximation.
At extreme redshifts, the color fades to black. And at extreme blueshifts (past violet),
the color turns to a metallic silver to represent x-rays, then to bright white
to represent gamma rays (totally unphysical, but just to get a sense of it).

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Relativity Park: Walking Speed of Light

Light is slow here

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