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Relativity Visualized

spacetimetravel.org

53 pointsrblion12 comments

I found that an interactive game, Velocity Raptor, gave a great intuition for relativity: http://www.testtubegames.com/velocityraptor.html

The premise is that you control a character moving at relativistic speeds. The first handful of levels are just to get used to the controls, and not very interesting. It is worth sticking with it for the later levels.

Wow. Thank you for that link. A (computer)game that kept me interested for more than 30 seconds is pretty rare.

That's a really good one! As I recall, it introduces concepts one at a time in a good, educational way, and it winds up fully relativistic (and kinda crazy) by the end.

Another more immersive but less "instructive" game is "A Slower Speed of Light": http://gamelab.mit.edu/games/a-slower-speed-of-light/ It's pretty cool, though it gets disorienting by the end.

I remember playing Psycho Fox on the Sega Master System which had a similar inertia based control (except it was side scrolling rather than top down)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psycho_Fox

I've once made a simple demo about gravitational lensing. http://codepen.io/cihadturhan/full/lqDdo/

Really neat effect, and great use of canvas! Have we ever captured an image of something like a black hole-galaxy eclipse as displayed during the opening animation of your demo? I've never seen a full Einstein ring with darkness in the center... Cool nonetheless!

Thanks, I was planning to create a black hole simulation on the web and that would be the intro. I've inspired from the computer simulated animations but there are real images out there.

That is fantastic. I featured it on the front page of the Arlington Planetarium website: http://friendsoftheplanetarium.org/

I found this one quite helpful: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=C2VMO7pcWhg

Really loved it.

Does anyone know of a general & special relativity simulator? That is, a program where I can setup various "thought experiments", by placing clocks and masses at various point in space, where they can have various acceleration profiles, and can communicate with each other, and run the scenarios? I never really understood the twins "paradox" and the explanations for the source of the asymmetry seemed hand-wavy and "because".

Very cool, I particularly enjoyed the wormhole trip. Reminds me of 'Real Time Relativity', a fun program for exploring 3d worlds at relativistic speeds: http://realtimerelativity.org/

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