# Seeing Relativity: Trip out on a light-speed rollercoaster



## qubit (Nov 2, 2011)

This video is cool, but just too weird to figure out. If anyone understands what they're seeing, let me know.



> It's the ultimate ride for thrill-seekers: a rollercoaster hurtling down a track at near-light speed surrounded by colour changes and distortions. Now, an animation developed by physicist Michael Hush from the Australian National University in Canberra lets you see the effects described by Einstein's special theory of relativity, by creating a fictional world where the speed of light is about 5 metres per second.



New Scientist


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## Drone (Nov 2, 2011)

Nice but nothing can ever beat Carl Sagan's videos. I love them so much.

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## AphexDreamer (Nov 2, 2011)

I so want to travel at light speed now. Or maybe getting drunk and high at the same time would have the same effect?


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## Sasqui (Nov 2, 2011)

Very cool, though a little low budget looking.  I'm hoping that the producers of IMAX work on a version for the Mugar Theater at the Boston Museum of Science.

In theory, your mass would increase so much at this speed that no coaster could hold you.



AphexDreamer said:


> I so want to travel at light speed now. Or maybe getting drunk and high at the same time would have the same effect?



Certainly helps the imagination, LOL


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## pantherx12 (Nov 2, 2011)

Sasqui said:


> your mass would increase



Mass would be the same weight would increase


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## DannibusX (Nov 2, 2011)

Drone said:


> Nice but nothing can ever beat Carl Sagan's videos. I love them so much.



Carl Sagan's Cosmos is one of my favorite edutainment progams ever.  It's great that it's so old, as far as media is concerned, and everything is still relevant with little updating needed.  I bought it on DVD as soon as I could.


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## AphexDreamer (Nov 2, 2011)

And if we somehow figured how to travel faster than light wouldn't everything just get dark?


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## DannibusX (Nov 2, 2011)

AphexDreamer said:


> And if we somehow figured how to travel faster than light wouldn't everything just get dark?



I wouldn't know, but even if you somehow find a way to travel faster than light it wouldn't necessarily get dark because from our vantage point in the universe we are surrounded by light from every possible direction.


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## Drone (Nov 2, 2011)

DannibusX said:


> Carl Sagan's Cosmos is one of my favorite edutainment progams ever.  It's great that it's so old, as far as media is concerned, and everything is still relevant with little updating needed.  I bought it on DVD as soon as I could.



It's a great video indeed. Science popularization at its best.



> if you somehow find a way to travel faster than light it wouldn't necessarily get dark because from our vantage point in the universe we are surrounded by light from every possible direction.



Well I always imagined this from tachyon movement. See the gif below, where the grey sphere is a superluminal object 







_*Because a tachyon always moves faster than light, we cannot see it approaching.* After a tachyon has passed nearby, we would be able to see *two* images of it, appearing and departing in opposite directions. The right hand bluish shape is the image formed by the blue-doppler shifted light arriving at the observer—who is located at the apex of the black Cherenkov lines—from the sphere as it approaches. The left-hand reddish image is formed from redshifted light that leaves the sphere after it passes the observer._


So I think if something moves FTL then all its surroundings would look that way (two distorted images of every object)


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## Damn_Smooth (Nov 2, 2011)

I call horseshit. I never saw any plaid in that video.


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## Inceptor (Nov 3, 2011)

pantherx12 said:


> Mass would be the same weight would increase



'Apparent mass', relative to the rest of the universe, would increase with the continually increasing (and massive) amounts of energy needed to propel you closer and closer to the speed of light.  Mass in your 'rest frame' would not change.
Similar to what you said, but different.
The rollercoaster would have to be made of some kind of super strong material to handle the astromonically huge potential energy imparted to the car to get it travelling at relativistic velocities.

Of course, there would be all kinds of problems with how you would supply the energy needed to propel yourself to such velocities and still have a low enough mass to make the energy requirement 'manageable', as in, still, some fraction of a star's energy output to propel even a small vehicle to high relativistic velocities.  Anything over the 50-75% range would require huge amounts of energy.  Anything over 90% would be absolutely staggering amounts of energy.

@Qubit:
The links on that page go to nice explanations of the effects.
As do Drone's clips from Cosmos, above.


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