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.

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.

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?

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

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

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...)

              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.

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?

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

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

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

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.

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

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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..

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.

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.

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.

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.