When the speed of human motion approaches the speed of light, something called the relativistic Doppler effect becomes perceptible. (Image credit: MIT Game Lab © 2021 Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Color changes In the computer game "A Slower Speed of Light," players approach the speed of light as they collect more orbs. If we could witness special relativity, however, we would notice changes in colors, time, distance and brightness, and the team incorporated those effects into the game. However, the speed of light does change depending on the materials it's passing through, but that doesn't change the effects of special relativity, or how we perceive them, Kortemeyer said. The speed of light in a vacuum never changes and is constant for every observer. In reality, the speed of light would not slow down the way it does in the game. Every time the character collects one of the 100 orbs, the speed of light slows. In the game, released in 2012 and called " A Slower Speed of Light," the player controls a character who collects beach ball-like orbs. While Kortemeyer was working as a visiting professor at MIT, he, Tan and colleagues at the MIT Game Lab created a computer game to illustrate what the world would be like if the speed of light were slow enough that special relativity were noticeable in everyday life.
In both cases, we'd be moving at near light speed.
Those same changes would occur if, instead of humans speeding up, light slowed down.
According to Albert Einstein's theory of special relativity - which explains how speed affects mass, time and space - time would slow down, we would measure objects as being shorter as we whizzed past them and the Doppler effect would become visible for light, among other changes. "The fastest any human has traveled is about 0.0037% the speed of light, and you need to be in some kind of space vehicle to reach those speeds," Philip Tan, research scientist at the MIT Game Lab, told Live Science.īut by doing thought experiments, physicists have determined that unusual things would happen if humans could travel at near light speed, said Kortemeyer, who is also an associate professor of physics at Michigan State University.
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