Xref: utzoo sci.physics:2617 rec.games.programmer:36 comp.sys.mac:9916 Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!mcvax!ukc!its63b!hwcs!jack 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 JANET:jack@uk.ac.glasgow.cs USENET: ...mcvax!ukc!cs.glasgow.ac.uk!jack Mail: Jack Campin, Computing Science Department, University of Glasgow, 17 Lilybank Gardens, Glasgow G12 8QQ, Scotland (041 339 8855 x 6045)