Gaming Your Way Through a Relativistic Universe

Remember in Super Mario Brothers, how the music and time would speed up when you started running low on the clock? Well, here’s a new level of video game time-freakiness, all about relativity. 

Strange things happen to our perception of the universe when we travel close to the speed of light (you know, if we could travel close to the speed of light). Special relativity, as worked out by Einstein and others, gives us plenty of weirdness when it comes to our perception of time and distance at those extreme speeds. MIT’s Game Lab has developed a game that simulates that experience. It’s called A Slower Speed of Light.

The closer we get to the speed of light, time slows down for us relative to someone watching us (“time dilation”), light shifts to red and blue, and the lengths of things contract in the direction we are moving. Weirded out yet? Ethan Siegel has a pretty good explanation of all those strange effects.

In the game, the object is to collect these orbs. As you grab each one, the speed of light slows down a bit. That means that you get closer and closer to traveling at the speed of light, and the game shifts the visuals and your movement to give you an idea of what that might feel like. It is not unlike a relativistic drug trip.

The game is available for Mac and PC. Pause the Halo and give relativity a whirl. It’s a video game that Einstein would have approved of!

(via Discovery News)

Source: news.discovery.com

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