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- Hacker News
- Too bad that it does not seem to work on mobile. I did not find any way to move around (add arrow buttons? Are we supposed to move around?) and if I double tap I change the direction in which I am looking but not very predictably. Maybe my phone is too slow.by pmontra
- There is a mobile version https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49638121by lysium
- The first few Discworld books explore this a little bit too. I think pterry dropped the concept after that, I don't really remember it later in the series.by zrail
- Darkness travels even faster than light on Discworld, because it has to be fast enough to get out of the way when light arrives.by yreg
- The book Redshift Rendezvous from 1990 explores this idea. (TBH the story is a little clunky, but if you like to see someone look at the physics in depth, it's pretty interesting.)
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/1382560.Redshift_Rend...
by IvyMike - similarly, Einstein's Dreams is a collection of very short stories that explore different flavors of time. For example: time slows as you near the city center - those who approach it end up frozen forever like the event horizon of a black hole.by nielsbot
- I'm reading the clockwork rocket at the moment. It's a little different but it's set in a universe where the laws of physics / behaviour of light seems to be different to our own.by jcul
- MIT Game Lab made a take on this back in 2012.
- Loved that game!! Blew my mind in my 1st year physics classesby chamomeal
- Played around with this one before. Very interesting. Thanks for linking it.by Tostino
- I ran into this a while back when I was trying to design an RTS with information delay.by hn993302
- It seems like it's open source, and that it splits the game from the actual engine, so if someone wants to vibecode something of their own, they can take this as a base rather than vibing the physics from scratch, with the risks of messing the core mechanic from scratch.
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.
by TZubiri - Discussed a few times:
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)
by dang - It would be nice to add controls for mobile.by gryfft
- by kshmir
- No doubt inspired by George Gamow's Mr.Tompkins in Wonderland (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr_Tompkins). That was recommended reading for entering Physics undergrads when I did my degree.by dramm
- Velocity raptor is a free game that accurately simulates the effects of special relativity. It slows down the speed of light to 3m/s and you solve puzzles as a cute dinosaur. https://www.testtubegames.com/velocityraptor.html
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.
by tristanj - Interesting this has the exact same controls with slidy movement + space bar to stop. It seems likely Claude based it off of it and the other MIT game.by koolala
- From further back, https://gamelab.mit.edu/games/a-slower-speed-of-light/ and https://theandelope.itch.io/a-slower-speed-of-light (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4731749 284 points by po on Nov 2, 2012 with 106 comments and in 2024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40332586 with 60 comments)
> 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.
by shagie - I know this takes the fun out of it, and it is a fun project, but FWIW the speed of light is not an independent variable. It's woven into the fine-structure constant, the relationship between mass and energy, and how any kind of information is transmitted between objects in the universe.
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.
by timoth3y - You can adjust the speed of light and hold the fine structure constant (and all other dimensionless parameters) fixed by adjusting some of the other dimensionful parameters.by evanb
- I think the unspoken point of these simulations (Carl Sagan also famously did one for the good Cosmos) is not what if the speed of light was lower, but what would traveling at near the speed of light look like in a more recognizable/'intuitable' scenario than the endless vastness of space with little specks of stars flying by us.
- Whenever I think about light speed being fast, I imagine myself standing at the edge of the solar system and watching a hypothetical photon travel from the Sun to the Earth and taking 8 minutes. Suddenly it doesn't feel like light is really all that fast except at human scales. 5 km/h would be fascinating though.by rootusrootus
- For the photon the time passed is 0 right?
- The speed of light is unbelievably slow, not even as a cosmic scale, but on earth.
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.
by HDBaseT - But light is not really even light except at human inference level. Like yes if you were a god like being looking at this and understanding light in a proton level way, it wouldn't be very impressive but I would say that is not the right way to think about physcial phenomena. How can you even be sure time has any definite meaning outside human's concept of it? In that sense what do words faster or slower or minutes even meanby altmanaltman
- On the other hand think of the wavelength of light and how absurdly fast the oscillation frequency is to provide a wavelength of a few hundred nm at the speed of light. 8 minutes is a lot of cycles, and 150M km is a lot of wavelengths!by HPsquared
- I wish the guy who created this included a 'your perceived velocity relative to [some fixed point]'. The speedometer shows what an at rest observer would perceive your velocity as, not what you would perceive it is. The 'magic' of relativity is that the speed of light is not really a speed limit. You can travel endlessly far ahead of it. Distance and time then begin to distort, and you effectively travel into the future, but you can go arbitrarily faster than it.
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.
- The globe here is, in my opinion, the best such visualization because I've personally travelled the distances depicted.
https://www.reddit.com/r/educationalgifs/comments/qq5cw7/coo...
by jbaber - One oddity of Lorentz invariance is that two non-parallel boosts decompose into a boost and spatial rotation.
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?
by greysphere