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From: jack@cs.hw.ac.uk (Jack Campin)
Newsgroups: sci.physics,rec.games.programmer,comp.sys.mac
Subject: simulating relativistic motion
Message-ID: <1573@brahma.cs.hw.ac.uk>
Date: 7 Dec 87 21:00:08 GMT
Organization: Computer Science, Heriot-Watt U., Scotland
Lines: 18
Keywords: relativity, graphics, flight simulators

A long time ago I read about a program developed at MIT that produced
images of the way ordinary scenes (a street) would look at speeds nearing
c. I don't know if it used a plotter or calligraphic display, but it was
so long ago that whatever it did should surely be possible now in real time
on a Mac or equivalent. Does anything like that exist? - a sort of flight
simulator for cosmic ray particles, that would let you define a scene
with a 3D graphics editor and then look at it at various fractions of c.
(Colour would be a nice optional extra). The MIT program produced weirdly
drooping lampposts.
More ambitiously: what about general relativity? Here I am thinking about
some of the descriptions in Kaufmann's "The Cosmic Frontiers of General
Relativity" about how the world would look from near a black hole.

-- 
ARPA: jack%cs.glasgow.ac.uk@nss.cs.ucl.ac.uk
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Mail: Jack Campin, Computing Science Department, University of Glasgow,
      17 Lilybank Gardens, Glasgow G12 8QQ, Scotland (041 339 8855 x 6045)