https://gamelab.mit.edu/games/a-slower-speed-of-light/

I feel like a rule of vibecoding would be that you shouldn't do it for the core of a product, the quality is just not there yet. Even if it is, your core contribution should be what LLMs would train on, rather than being their output.

A Slower Speed of Light (2012) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40332586 - May 2024 (59 comments)

What if we could reduce the speed of light - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26309517 - March 2021 (1 comment)

A Slower Speed of Light (2012) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17169262 - May 2018 (15 comments)

A Slower Speed of Light - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4731749 - Nov 2012 (105 comments)

"A Slower Speed of Light" Game Trailer - MIT Game Lab - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4714779 - Oct 2012 (1 comment)

There is also a helpful FAQ which explains all the strange things happening, such as length contraction, time dilation, and color shifting: https://testtubegames.com/srel101.html

My favorite levels are #18 (which demonstrates time dilation), #26 (which demonstrates space warping), and #42 (which demonstrates retarded time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retarded_time ). All the levels are unlocked and you can skip to any level.

> A Slower Speed of Light is a first-person game prototype in which players navigate a 3D space while picking up orbs that reduce the speed of light in increments. Custom-built, open-source relativistic graphics code allows the speed of light in the game to approach the player’s own maximum walking speed. Visual effects of special relativity gradually become apparent to the player, increasing the challenge of gameplay. These effects, rendered in realtime to vertex accuracy, include the Doppler effect (red- and blue-shifting of visible light, and the shifting of infrared and ultraviolet light into the visible spectrum); the searchlight effect (increased brightness in the direction of travel); time dilation (differences in the perceived passage of time from the player and the outside world); Lorentz transformation (warping of space at near-light speeds); and the runtime effect (the ability to see objects as they were in the past, due to the travel time of light). Players can choose to share their mastery and experience of the game through Twitter. A Slower Speed of Light combines accessible gameplay and a fantasy setting with theoretical and computational physics research to deliver an engaging and pedagogically rich experience.

Basically imagine like if you wanted to walk in a straight line between two points at both ends of a empty, long, narrow rectangular warehouse, and instead of walking in a straight line from A to B, you bounced off each wall at an angle (like a pool ball ricocheting off the bumpers) to get from one end to the other. Making your cumulative distance travelled on foot much greater.

At the risk of exposing how little I remember from physics, doesn't light in a single mode fiber not bounce? (right about now I'm thinking that it's probably not great to think of photons bouncing because this is quantum level stuff, right? light is a wave, etc. gosh it's been a long time since I tried to really know any of this...)

https://www.aflhyperscale.com/articles/how-do-fiber-optics-w...

If you google image search "refraction fiber optics" you'll get some decent pictorial examples of what I meant by photons bouncing off the interior walls of a 9/125 SM fiber optic strand billions/trillions of times on its path, I guess I was trying to write an extremely simplified explanation of refraction in something like a typical SMF-28e / G.652.D fiber.

I know there are many other mundane technologies that can be described in sci-fi-ish way, but for some reason I'm particularly amazed by fiber transmitters being compact and cheap enough to be used in mass-produced killer drones.

When I say data rates are way below 1 Gbps, it's because commonly you've got two things going on, a UART serial bridge from operator to flight controller board (same idea as what is implemented in RF with ExpressLRS, TBS Crossfire or similar), this is at most a Mbps or two. Then a possible live video feed over IP which will be easily under 50 Mbps.

The only thing a little bit out of the ordinary about them is that they're often bidirectional single strand optics with the prism built in, and tx/rx on different wavelengths (like 1550 and 1570, or 1550 and 1610, or whatever). Basically same thing that somebody lighting a very low cost metro dark fiber circuit might do to use only 1 strand for a gigabit or 10 Gbps link.

There's more advanced ones that take video input from a MIPI digital video interface or native HDMI input.

Not just because latency but also because of cost, size, weight, power.

We cannot play competitive multiplayer games globally, without 300ms ping. I dream of a world playing Black Ops 2 on a original PS3 in 2026 getting into a lobby because latency is low.

https://wondernetwork.com/pings/Auckland

Your real world latency is going to be worse.

300ms feels extremely optimistic coming from my perspective of someone living on an island in SE Asia

https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html

This is of course assuming instant activation, a direct connection and no additional latency from network hardware.

The point is to quickly and accessibly convey an intuitive understanding of the propagation speed of information in biological circuits vs. the max speed of information in our universe (to our current knowledge at least) and in our technology.

https://www.reddit.com/r/educationalgifs/comments/qq5cw7/coo...

If we ever reach the technology to enable relativistic starships (basically able to accelerate at 1g or so for years at a time), then the universe is going to get seriously weird. Not only for us, but also for people in the distant future who will regularly have ancient relics from the past traveling into their time, when they will likely scarcely resemble us, and going 'Hello fellow... humans?' That'd be some next level archaeology opportunities though.

It'll also be socially odd as the elite and powerful travel off into the future seeking immortality, unable to ever return, at least so far as we currently understand.

You cannot. The speed of light limits you, even as you approach it, by changing distance itself.

There is no absolute distance between two points; all astronomical distances are calculated in a non-relativistic framework. This is perfectly acceptable, since we all live in that framework relative to each other, and even if we were talking to multi-generational "friends" on Alpha Centauri, it would still hold true for both sides (to within an imperceptible error).

This is why it is sometimes suggested that photons don't "travel" at all; because they move at c, every spot they go to is the same spot to them. A divide-by-zero non-error.

This is also why it's 100% possible for a human to travel to Alpha Centauri, or even the edge of the known universe all within a single human lifetime, from his own perspective. Of course for an at rest observer, billions of years would have passed, but for him - mere decades.

Also one of my favorites is discworld scientist experimenting with ftl communication through succession by “modulating” a king above a pit of sharks an measuring his son at the other end of the world for “kingness”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Slower_Speed_of_Light

Having said that... this is mostly a slogan and makes for good Youtube videos, but it falls apart the moment you subject it to even the most basic scrutiny. For one... it doesn't make sense to talk about a speed through time since speed is literally a measure of change with respect to time, so a change in time with respect to time doesn't make any sense.

But as a slogan, it captures the idea that motion through space and the rate of your own clock are tightly linked together.

Only if you're talking about other people's clocks and not your own. Your own clock is one second per second, but someone else's may be slower or faster relative.

So then you say take someone else's clock and compare it to your own clock, but that is still just a pure number. A speed is not a number, it has units like meters per second. A ratio of two clocks has no units at all, the units cancel. Whatever number you get, 3 or 9, it's just a factor by which two clocks disagree. You can absolutely interpret this ratio as a rate, but that doesn't make it a speed.

And a speed is exactly what the slogan needs, because the diagram/geometry it's using involves a right angled triangle where on one side of the triangle is your speed through space, and on the other side of the triangle is your speed through time, and the hypotenuse of the triangle is fixed at c (since every object travels through spacetime at this fixed speed).

For that to mean anything both sides have to be the same kind of quantity. You can't put meters per second on one side and a bare number on the other and call it a triangle. Nor can you patch it by multiplying the ratio by c to give it units, because the thing you get then grows as you speed up instead of shrinking. Either it has the right units and the wrong behavior, or the right behavior and no units at all. There's no version of this geometry that produces a consistent picture.

You can say the age of the universe is 14 billion years, but that's in our reference frame.

In another reference frame it may be a different number.

People working at AI labs like yourself should figure out how to stop destroying science so there are still people who know enough to call you out when you spread misconceptions.

> preferred

While these are meaningful conventions, they are being measured with respect to that rest frame.

The local group moves at some few hundred km/s velocity relative to the CMB, so the age of the universe in our reference frame will be slightly shorter than that preferred frame. Call it ~10^-7 shorter but still ever so slightly shorter. That was my point.

As such I wouldn't base my understanding on the subject on this as-is. Which is a shame as, if it was actually hand coded I might actually use this to learn relativity, something which would otherwise be out of my reach.

A note on source code, I think committing the actual javascript code and such is a mistake at the level of committing compiled binaries to a repo. It's more useful, correct and genuine to upload the prompts used, which are the source code that generates the target code, and upon which the author and others can study and modify the program.

That said, as an idea, it reminds me of Kay's dynabook example ( https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/800193.1971922 ) :

"Here look." Her fingers started to fly on the DynaBook's keyboard, altering the program she had·written several weeks before .. You justact as though the ship is pointed towards the sun and add speed!· As she spoke her ship started to fall, but not towards the sun. Oh no!..·"

If we want to move closer to that ideal, of interactive education, I don't think we can just apply the old forms and use the LLM to aid one in being the allmighty program-creator, the LLM needs to be placed at the service of the user. I can't help but seeing the usage of LLMs to generate code as misplacing this power. It's as if a new powerful metal were discovered and smiths can only think about making hammers and foundries and casts with that metal, considering it too valuable to actually use it for the products being smithed.

Electronics wouldnt work at all.

https://youtu.be/uu7jA8EHi_0

Some of the details in the paper are super cool. Since the game pulls "c" down to near walking speed, you receive photons at different rates depending on their direction relative to your motion (relativistic aberration / searchlight effect) resulting in neat visual shifts.

I don't usually download games, but I might have to make an exception just to try it out.

Just a thought experiment for you guys: imagine a bacteria that survives inside humans. It doesn't even know what a human is. For the bacteria, its entire world is simply the environment in which it lives. It doesn't know that we are living beings actively trying to maintain ourselves and survive.

Now, suppose a harmful bacteria enters our body, makes us sick, and we take medicine that kills all of them. From the bacteria's perspective, it could look like a natural disaster or some unexplained event in which they all suddenly get wiped out. They have no idea that a living being called a human actively tried to eliminate them using something called medicine, which was engineered specifically to kill them.

Similarly, what if our world, or nature itself, is part of some higher-level entity that we simply exist within? What if the reason for our deaths, natural calamities, and other events is something completely beyond our perception? Whatever we do, we may never be able to understand what is actually happening at that level, just as bacteria may never be able to understand that humans exist.

One thing that could potentially support this idea is self-regulation. We see self-regulating systems throughout nature, and these patterns seem to repeat at different scales. We ourselves are self-regulating organisms, and nature also has countless cycles and mechanisms that regulate themselves.

Maybe these patterns continue at scales we cannot perceive. We can observe certain things at the scale of humans, but we still don't fully understand what happens at the nano scale or on the scale of the universe. Perhaps there are higher levels of organization and self-regulation that we simply don't have the ability to perceive yet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKnpPCQyUec

But let me tell you another possibility. What if there is no nature, but just our perception of it.

Yea, tree falling in the forest and all that...stated more explicitly..

Gitanjali GulveSehgal @gigi_sehgal Jun 22 Replying to @fermatslibrary Contrarian Takes: 1. We live in a “box” governed by the compute we are capable of. Perhaps the rockets are out there in a form we cannot observe. ( borrowing from Quantum Ruliad ). E.g What do bacteria think of us? Do we “exist” for them? Are we infrastructure or entities to them? Do they think we do not exist? We cannot see Neutrinos streaming thru our bodies but atleast we managed to figure out that they existed. Who knows what else exists that our senses and technology cannot perceive or reverse engineer existence of? 2. Perhaps they have remote observation capability, 3. Perhaps its a simulation we are in a space alien overlord’s lab 4. Perhaps the Men in Black wiped our memory each time we see them 5. What were those drones flying over DC? 6. Perhaps they are already here

EDIT: ah, by setting 'Speed of light' parameter to 40km/hr I find it a bit more intuitive

Forward means light is hitting your eyes faster, making it look like the distance the light had to cross is condensed, meaning it looks further away.

Moving backwards slights the light hitting your eyes, to the point where you're moving away from the light, so everything goes black.

Edit, maybe it's because the speed shift is so coarse I cross past 0 km/h from back to forwards and reverse too fast...

Other than this, very very nice. Love this kind of thing for developing intuiting outside the normal range in which we experience the laws of Physics. Well done.

That's exactly what would happen ins space.

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/1382560.Redshift_Rend...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein's_Dreams

Many issues with the MIT game were discussed here:

https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/43695/how-realis...

While the thread lists multiple issues, the issue that I found was with modeling temporal aspects of relativistic doppler (I also reported it on the github repo of the "slower speed of light" project, but that doesn't appear to be maintained):

https://github.com/MITGameLab/OpenRelativity/issues/17

In this game, it looks like the temporal component of the Doppler effect is modelled correctly.

Very reminiscent of the Casimir effect experiments.

Edit: ah I did some googling and relativistic aberration has the opposite effect and beats out length contraction.

I got confused by the premise. To the fully blind person, the speed of light does not matter. He'll hit the object 5 meters away from him regardless if he sees it or not (as will everyone else, but it'll look weird).

I've never quite wrapped my head around this and was hoping to get some insight from this simulation. But afaict, I'm not seeing this effect (press W for a bit, the A for a bit and it's not obvious I'm at a different orientation - if I look down at the ground the gridlines are still axial).

I don't know if I'm misinterpreting the math, or the simulation, or maybe the simulation is doing something to 'correct' for this behavior so things are more natural, or something else. Does anyone have any insight?

In the sources I see that the acceleration is applied simply by utilizing a velocity‐addition formula (see https://github.com/dbrant/relativity/blob/fcc20fb18381959ac2...), so no Wigner rotation appears. I guess all the fancy stuff related to how time passes in an accelerating frame (like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_paradox#Difference_in_ela...) is also wrong in this simulation because of that.

You can however observe a mathematically equivalent effect in hyperbolic games, e.g., in Hyperbolica. Hyperbolica even has a quest about rotating a chest by moving it along the axes. On the hyperbolic plane it’s of course not about acceleration but about a winding number you’re doing around some point, but it’s still fun.

To stop a 'blight' in the universe, some natural laws have to be changed wherever it starts to spread, is the story premise if memory serves me.

The Forever War series changes the speed of light at the end to mess with the mortals, not to prevent any calamity however.

How i got there:

The closest major galaxy to the Milky Way is Andromeda, and is 2.5 million! light-years away. And this is the CLOSEST galaxy, the universe is extremely big.

Of course that as you get closer to C, the traveling object will experience time dilation (relative to observer), so the time passed will be less. At 99.999% C, the traveler would take ~11,000 years to arrive to Andromeda.

So again, even at 99.999% C, 11K years seems like a LONG time to reach even the closest galaxy.

My reasoning was: the speed of light is pretty damn slow.

But then I realized: no, it's not the speed of light that is slow, is my frame of reference.

For us humans, 11,000 years seems like A LONG time, but for the universe is not that long.

The universe's age is estimated to be 13.8 billion years. 11,000 years is 0.0000007971 of the age of the universe.

An average human lives 70 years, 0.0000007971 of that lifespan is approximately ~0.4 hours, or 29 minutes, so it's not that bad.

So yeah, frame of reference matters.

if we add more 9s, is it possible to reduce that number to within a human lifespan?

If you accelerate at 1g constantly for 1y you travel 0.5 light years. You do that for 10.5 years and you reach the center of the milky way. You do that for another 4 (~14 total) years and you are in the Andromeda galaxy, and you do that for another 10 years (~24 years total) and you reach what today is considered the edge of the observable universe.

By the time you get there you are basically traveling at a rounding error from C.

People always say that about speed of light stuff, but I don’t get it. Do you have any more examples of counterintuitive math?

Because what you’re describing is basically the equivalent to compound interest in finance. (e.g. investing $100 at 10% interest over 10 years results in $260)

- [pic](https://home.davidgoffredo.com/hackernews/proper-time-one-li...)

- [plot](https://home.davidgoffredo.com/hackernews/proper-time-one-li...)

I'm not saying that I couldn't fire up Cloudflare Warp, but I think it's a legit issue for average users [0]?

[0] https://xkcd.com/2501/

Or I could go back to IPv4 with dynamic DNS, but that would mean changing domain registrars.

    david@carbon12:~ $ dig +short AAAA home.davidgoffredo.com
    2603:7000:5101:de1c::cafe:babe

pic: http://numpad0.com/imgs/home.davidgoffredo.com/proper-time-o...

plot: http://numpad0.com/imgs/home.davidgoffredo.com/proper-time-o...

              1,000 seconds =          ~0.01 days (~17 min)
          1,000,000 seconds =         ~11.57 days (~12 days) 
      1,000,000,000 seconds =     ~11,574.07 days (~32 years)
  1,000,000,000,000 seconds = ~11,574,074.07 days (~32k years)

Maybe it's just our human calendar/time unit rollercoaster (60*60*24*30*12) that's playing tricks on us here.

But it isn't intuitive, you're not used to numbers that big or that grow that fast.

Few things go from a million to a billion, especially when related to time.

I find it frustrating that people seem to think that someone going from 1M to 1B is somehow different to other numerical operations. It's not. It's 1000 times bigger, it's not a huge deal.

Somehow people are interpreting this as some kind of math trick.

It's not a trick, our brains are not wire to deal with numbers growing quickly, but we do understand the math.

Can't we accelerate past 1G constantly? Or do we expend so much energy doing it that we can't realistically do it with today's technology?

Chemical rockets are currently the only thing that allow sustaining such accelerations briefly for human-size payloads, but the low exhaust velocity and exponential reaction mass requirement make sustaining it for days/months/years completely impossible.

You'd have to supply the energy externally (i.e. some sort of beam propulsion), but getting any significant fraction of g out of such a system (with human-sized payloads) seems unlikely within the next centuries, especially as the distance increases.

Or some form of ram scope, plenty of H everywhere, but those also have the issue of you collecting things while going at relativistic speeds.

Magic warp bubble tech is the bare minimum, and we're nowhere close to inventing that.

Increasing the acceleration a little bit more than that (eg to 1%) would make a difference.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_of_Earth

Wouldn't that be only a few months on a decades-long journey at 1.01G vs 1G??

If the acceleration was too great but survivable, what happens? I can’t imagine my back, knees or ankles would like it.

It's hard to accelerate at or beyond 1G for very long with current technology. Roughly speaking, the rocket runs out of fuel soon. Packing more fuel makes the rocket heavier, meaning diminishing returns when using the fuel. The mass required grows exponentially. See "The tyranny of the rocket equation"

But that would be pretty pointless without taking the time to decelerate :)

At 99.999% of C, the Lorentz factor is ~223.6.

It grows pretty quickly as you add more 9s to the fraction. Every two additional 9s multiply the Lorentz factor by ~10.

So at 0.99999999999 c, it'd be ~223,607x.

2.5M years / 223,607 is: ~11 years

Of course this is all highly theoretical.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_factor

Yes. At 99.99999999% of c it would take 35 years from the perspective of the traveler. However, an observer on earth will still see it taking 2.5m years.

If you can somehow accelerate/decelerate at a constant human-acceptable 1G, time dilation means almost anywhere is reachable in a human-lifetime.

That coincidence(?) could easily become false if we are accustomed to lower accelerations or lesser lifespans.

The Overview Effekt: Time Dilation Visualized

https://youtu.be/8FT-oz9aZU4

Well, you also need clarketech heat dissipation and collision deflection technology, if you want to get there without vaporizing.

Colliding with a single 0.3 mg grain of salt at 20% of the speed of light creates an impact with 560 MJ of energy, equivalent to 130 kg of TNT, over 8 times the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

Even a tiny speck of dust, half a microgram, is equivalent to a hand grenade when hit at 20% the speed of light.

You wouldn't be able to even escape the solar system before your shields were devoured. If you accelerated at 1G constantly, you'd be going 3.5% of the speed of light by the time you reached Pluto's orbit. Space dust particles are already hitting you like nuclear bombs at that speed.

http://www.zitterbug.net/future/future815.html

What If Light Was Really Slow? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ge_j31Yx_yk -- https://duckduckgo.com/?q=slower+speed+of+light&ia=videos&ia...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tau_Zero

To an outside observer, the trip might have taken you millions or billions of years while to you it was only ten or twenty.

It’s helpful to think about the limit. To light, which travels at the speed of light, it arrives at your retina the exact moment it was created in the core of the sun. From our perspective, it took almost a million years (about a million years to make it from the core to the convective region, then another few minutes to travel from there to Earth).

So presumably this means 11k years from an earth point of view? But the traveler would still be alive and a very short time would have passed for him?

At 1g of constant acceleration you can reach Andromeda in just under 15 years of experienced time. An observer on Earth will perceive you as having taken a hair over 2,500,000 years to get there. You can get there arbitrarily quickly; at 10g it would take a 1 year 9 months. But an external observer on either planet will see you taking closer and closer to 2,500,000 years to make it the full distance.

Whereas a constant 1g acceleration would far exceed that fraction and thus shorten the time significantly.

When you say constant 1g acceleration, do you mean acceleration well past the speed of light? I thought we were talking about all speeds less than the speed of light.

The Lorentz factor, which governs time dilation and length contraction, is calculated as (1 / sqrt(1 - v^2 / c^2)), where v is the relative velocity of the object and c is the speed of light. You can replace (v^2 / c^2) with the factor beta^2, where beta is the ratio of v to c, e.g. 0.99999 in this case. Since (1 / sqrt (1 - 0.999...)) grows without bound in the limit as beta approaches (but doesn't reach) 1, if you keep accelerating, the time dilation keeps getting larger, without limits. It just takes a LOT of energy to do so.

I was still at a loss for the answer to how it could take 11k vs 28 years or so. I asked AI. lol

The thing I didn’t realize is the massive difference between 99.999% vs 99.9999% of the speed of light. I took 99.999% to mean "effectively the speed of light.” Relativity is weird.

At 1G constant acceleration reaching Andromeda would take ~15 years, or ~29 years if we also need to decelerate at the same 1G rate to not just whoosh by.

The furthest known galaxy is MoM-z14, which would take ~47 years to reach.

But unlike Andromeda, MoM-z14 is accelerating away from us, or more precisely, the space between us and MoM-z14 is expanding. It's "receding" at 726,000 km/s (= 2.4 times the speed of light). And still accelerating. Because of these, even the magical constant 1G accelerating spaceship can never reach it, not even in 1 Billion years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lS_WxQ3zeU

While I did read The Expanse, when I think of that class of dangers, what pops to my mind is an old short story Neutron Star (1966) [0]. A financially desperate pilot is hired to discover what killed some researchers while leaving the indestructible starship hull intact... and the thrusters off.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_Star_(short_story)

  > failsafe timers and dead-man switches when testing new things.

[0]:https://ci.nii.ac.jp/ncid/BB07948947

You think those time periods are large because you see a lot of numbers in the units you chose, or because it is much larger than your lifespan. But in the grand scheme a galaxy is nothing but a spec of dust, 10k years a blink of an eye.

There is no other natural velocity that I'm aware of that we could compare it to, but we can say that the speed of light is the fastest there is, so how can it be slow?

https://thinkzone.wlonk.com/SS/SolarSystemModel.php?scale=10... lets you make scale model calculations (useful if you're building one). The default model scale has the speed of light at 67.06 mi/h (107.9 km/h). This puts Earth out at 14.16 miles and Alpha Centauri at 2,581,000 miles away.

I personally like the "Sun is 5 inches" scale because that puts the speed of light at 323.1 ft/h (10x garden snail speed) which is 1.46 miles/day... because that puts Alpha Centauri at 2,354 miles away... which is a conceivable distance.

If you go to a scale of the sun being 500 inches (about 110000000) and the speed of light is 6 mph, Alpha Centauri is 234,600 miles away - the distance to the moon. It also lists the scale distance to the center of the Milky Way 1,327,000,000 miles) and Andromeda (137,400,000,000 miles) which are in the unconceivable range.

Edit: I now watched the animation. It's exactly the same as the YT video. Speed of light is very, very slow.

This discussion has made me wonder what it would look like to have a different scale where the distances are based on the “speed limit” (which is mostly 100km/hr)…so that earth, for example, would be 8min from the Sun. Neptune or Pluto would be 4 - 7 hours away.

It would still fit in Australia but be significantly larger.

https://thinkzone.wlonk.com/SS/SolarSystemModel.php?scale=10...

Professor Farnsworth: That's why scientists increased the speed of light in 2208.

Roman lowercase c is the metric prefix centi-. Roman uppercase C is the metric unit coulomb.

Italic uppercase C has various uses such as: a variable denoting capacitance in electrical engineering; an undetermined constant of integration in calculus.

The speed of light is high. It's just that the universe has expanded into an unimaginably large area by now.

Maybe it's the answer to Fermi paradox: aliens are all around, we're just too fast for them to communicate.

Along your trip you will see stars turn red, sometimes flashing white and blinking out, but sometimes just fading away.

Your civilization will without a doubt go extinct.

If you are exceedingly lucky, you may see other civilizations of other species arise... but you'd need very high energy receivers in front of you, or deep infrared receivers behind, and of course be staring at the right place to see the signs.

You may eventually begin to notice the revolving motion of galaxies. After that, if you continue, you'll see galaxies collide. By then your planet will have been dead for longer than it was a planet when you left it.

Light doesn't "travel". It's just an exchange of entangled photons creating the concept of time duration and distance.

Whether or not the speeds at which things happen in physics, chemistry, etc are somehow absolute, or somehow inherently relative to c, and would speed up and slow down if c changed, is an interesting question.

Website loads in few ms

Nahh it's not

When c is approximately 10^7 times lower, so is the wavelength (if we keep the frequency the same), so now-visible light would have wavelengths far shorter than an atom or a molecule, and probably couldn't be easily detected by biological means.

You could say: sure, maybe we'll just see light at lower frequency. Maybe that's true, but the energy of a single photon is E = hf, where h is the Planck constant. So if we assume much lower-frequency photons, they have much lower energy, and thus become harder to detect.

Lots of other things could be different, like chemistry, heat conduction etc.

At a height of roughly 1.8, at c = 5km/h, light would take 0.1 seconds to travel from head to toe. Nerve signals are much slower than c, so human bodies likely wouldn't exist as we know them.

The list of potential implications to consider is fascinating, endless and maybe even a bit overwhelming :-)

Checks repo.

Contributors: @dbrant dbrantDmitry Brant @claude claudeClaude

I’m tired boss

More realistically - the atmosphere would not be gaseous (everybody dies), the sun would be a black hole larger than the earth's orbit (everybody dies), and quite a few other problems.

It's yet another xkcd-level apocalypse.

(But What If he's sworn it to secrecy?;)

The cars seem to twist towards me as they approach and away from me as they recede, but from my initial stationary position, which is below the roof of the lowest car, I feel that I shouldn’t ever be able to see light from the top surface of a car’s roof?

If I toggle ‘L’ off then indeed, I can’t see the top of any of those cars. But I feel that even with it on, and in the absence of gravitational lensing, I feel the path of light from that top surface would always be blocked?

This is more of a simulation of what if light was perceived as 5mph for you and kept the same for everyone else.

It is cool though.

Is this a bug or am I just really confused?

E.g. when you accelerate ("W") the angle the light rays from in front of you appear to be coming changes, making them look farther away. If you let go of "W" you should keep your current velocity and see you are indeed still moving forward, just in a world more pronouncedly warped by the effects of relativity.

In physics, "we" use the raisin bread analogy where when you bake the bread, the raisins are all getting uniformly distant from each other with no central point of expansion and no obvious sign of pulling in any specific direction such as would be the case for a gravitational effect.

I also recommend a banner that says it doesn't work on mobile as it was quite confusing to me as to whether it was working or not.

5 km/hr = 4.56 ft/sec. so lightning is seen 1157 seconds or 19 minutes per mile. as opposed to the usual zero.

Sound travels 1100 ft/sec and is heard the usual 5 seconds per mile after the strike, but 19 minutes before the flash. Per mile of distance away.

I’m curious how you’re handling the visual distinction between time dilation/length contraction and the actual light-travel-time effects an observer would see. That seems like it could get surprisingly unintuitive once the scaled-down speed of light gets close to the objects’ velocities.

At 5kmph you see things leave the destination and reach you at the same time.

More than 5kmph, you see it is already in front of you and at the destination at the same time. Interesting :)