this is really great
Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?
31–40 of 223 posts
Re: Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?
#32What if the speed of light was 2c instead of c? Would that change anything for us?
Re: Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pedantic note: The speed of light in glass, optical fiber and water is different from vacuum (much lower). On a certain scale, humanity also knows how to locally alter the speed of light though not to this extent.
It's not actually that the speed of light in a singlemode fiber optic cable is slower, but that the photons aren't travelling in a direct path down the fiber like water down a pipe. They're bouncing off the interior walls of it at like a 45 degree angle billions/trillions of times before it reaches the other end of the cable. Basically imagine like if you wanted to walk in a straight line between two points at both e…
> They're bouncing off the interior walls of it at like a 45 degree angle billions/trillions of times before it reaches the other end of the cable
At the risk of exposing how little I remember from physics, doesn't light in a single mode fiber not bounce? (right about now I'm thinking that it's probably not great to think of photons bouncing because this is quantum level stuff, right? light is a wave, etc. gosh it's been a long time since I tried to really know any of this...)
Re: Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?
#34Would mean the biomolecular computers would be faster than electronics.
Electronics wouldnt work at all.
Re: Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?
#35Whenever I think about light speed being fast, I imagine myself standing at the edge of the solar system and watching a hypothetical photon travel from the Sun to the Earth and taking 8 minutes. Suddenly it doesn't feel like light is really all that fast except at human scales. 5 km/h would be fascinating though.
Re: Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you trying to tell me time is relative?
As understood by general relativity, it actually is. There is no absolute time. You can say the age of the universe is 14 billion years, but that's in our reference frame. In another reference frame it may be a different number.
I'm being flippant
Re: Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?
#37Velocity raptor is a free game that accurately simulates the effects of special relativity. It slows down the speed of light to 3m/s and you solve puzzles as a cute dinosaur. https://www.testtubegames.com/velocityraptor.html There is also a helpful FAQ which explains all the strange things happening, such as length contraction, time dilation, and color shifting: https://testtubegames.com/srel101.html My favorite leve…
Interesting this has the exact same controls with slidy movement + space bar to stop. It seems likely Claude based it off of it and the other MIT game.
Re: Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?
#38Which parts of this were ideas you came up with yourself?
Re: Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not actually that the speed of light in a singlemode fiber optic cable is slower, but that the photons aren't travelling in a direct path down the fiber like water down a pipe. They're bouncing off the interior walls of it at like a 45 degree angle billions/trillions of times before it reaches the other end of the cable. Basically imagine like if you wanted to walk in a straight line between two points at both e…
> They're bouncing off the interior walls of it at like a 45 degree angle billions/trillions of times before it reaches the other end of the cable At the risk of exposing how little I remember from physics, doesn't light in a single mode fiber not bounce? (right about now I'm thinking that it's probably not great to think of photons bouncing because this is quantum level stuff, right? light is a wave, etc. gosh it's…
The bouncing is more a metaphor, the refraction of light bending at an angle is sort of like how if you as an exterior observer look at a person who is standing waist deep in a very calm and clear swimming pool, their legs appear to be at a different position than their torso. Now imagine that 'bending' repeating trillions of times.
https://www.aflhyperscale.com/articles/how-do-fiber-optics-w...
Re: Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?
#40What if the speed of light was 2c instead of c? Would that change anything for us?
Less latency in multiplayer games or Zoom calls. Because light can travel around the Earth 7 times in one second, that means one roundtrip to a server on the other side of the world must take ~140 ms (1/7th of a second) which is a timescale you are able to feel. That's lag in multiplayer games. I'm constantly amazed that the reason why multiplayer client-side prediction strategies like rollback netcode exist is because light is slow enough on a human scale that we actually have to architect around it. Light is surprisingly slow in some ways.