Visualising Relativity

[Poita (Peter)]

This is a bit of fun.

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/ns...ef=solarsystem

[bojan]

Fantastic.. and VERY counter-intuitive.

[mishku]

wow... I'm going to need to have a couple more goes at this (possibly with a large cup of coffee and a physics textbook) before I can honestly say that it makes sense

[sjastro]

A good video.

It shows the effects of a transverse Doppler shift which is unknown in classical physics but was predicted by SR.

I have tried to visualize the colour transition as one goes from a transverse Doppler shift to a longitudinal (classical) Doppler shift.

This video has confirmed by suspicions.

Regards

Steven

[ZeroID (Brent)]

Too much LSD I reckon... I gotta stop taking that stuff.

Certainly makes you think though. I get the colour shift no problem, still not quite au fait with the distortion effect of angular compression. The receding Saturn in the last phase was an unexpected effect. Have to go away now and think about all that.

Sending the link to work so I can confuse them all.

[sjastro]

The angular distortion is straightforward. It's simple mathematics to calculate the angle of a photon's path to the direction of the moving observer's frame of reference at any given velocity. This is what constitutes relativistic aberration.

The colour shift is simple if one is dealing with pure longitutional or pure transverse motion. A combination of the two in a flyby scenario however requires careful thought.

It's analogous to knowing the answer is grey but what shade of grey.

Regards

Steven