Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can adjust the speed of light and hold the fine structure constant (and all other dimensionless parameters) fixed by adjusting some of the other dimensionful parameters.
Found Q's alt account.
Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?
241–250 of 269 posts
Re: Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?
#242At first sight, this is remarkably more accurate that the "slower speed of light" game from MIT that was made available all those years ago (~2012). Many issues with the MIT game were discussed here: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/43695/how-realis... While the thread lists multiple issues, the issue that I found was with modeling temporal aspects of relativistic doppler (I also reported it on the github…
Re: Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?
#243Re: Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?
#244I assume someone has considered whether the apparent expansion of the universe is spaghettification as we enter an event horizon?
Re: Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?
#245Some time ago I had the following shower thought: "the Speed of Light is pretty slow" How i got there: The closest major galaxy to the Milky Way is Andromeda, and is 2.5 million! light-years away. And this is the CLOSEST galaxy, the universe is extremely big. Of course that as you get closer to C, the traveling object will experience time dilation (relative to observer), so the time passed will be less. At 99.999% C,…
In terms of comparisons to human lifespan, I think this one is interesting: If you can somehow accelerate/decelerate at a constant human-acceptable 1G, time dilation means almost anywhere is reachable in a human-lifetime. That coincidence(?) could easily become false if we are accustomed to lower accelerations or lesser lifespans.
Re: Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?
#246Some time ago I had the following shower thought: "the Speed of Light is pretty slow" How i got there: The closest major galaxy to the Milky Way is Andromeda, and is 2.5 million! light-years away. And this is the CLOSEST galaxy, the universe is extremely big. Of course that as you get closer to C, the traveling object will experience time dilation (relative to observer), so the time passed will be less. At 99.999% C,…
Re: Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?
#247Some time ago I had the following shower thought: "the Speed of Light is pretty slow" How i got there: The closest major galaxy to the Milky Way is Andromeda, and is 2.5 million! light-years away. And this is the CLOSEST galaxy, the universe is extremely big. Of course that as you get closer to C, the traveling object will experience time dilation (relative to observer), so the time passed will be less. At 99.999% C,…
In terms of comparisons to human lifespan, I think this one is interesting: If you can somehow accelerate/decelerate at a constant human-acceptable 1G, time dilation means almost anywhere is reachable in a human-lifetime. That coincidence(?) could easily become false if we are accustomed to lower accelerations or lesser lifespans.
Re: Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?
#248The Schwarzschild radius is proportional to c^-2, so this would mean the Schwarzschild radius of the Earth would be about 400 billion km, and the Earth would be a black hole.
If you're allowed to change the speed of light, you can also change the gravitational constant G to compensate since the Schwarzschild radius is r = 2GM/c^2, where M is the mass of the object.
Re: Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
Links seem to be broken?
No, but IPv6 only these days. I never set up dynamic DNS.
Re: Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
In terms of comparisons to human lifespan, I think this one is interesting: If you can somehow accelerate/decelerate at a constant human-acceptable 1G, time dilation means almost anywhere is reachable in a human-lifetime. That coincidence(?) could easily become false if we are accustomed to lower accelerations or lesser lifespans.
I’m confused. Is it 11k years to the closest galaxy at the speed of light, or somehow accessible in a human lifetime?
To an outside observer, the trip might have taken you millions or billions of years while to you it was only ten or twenty.
It’s helpful to think about the limit. To light, which travels at the speed of light, it arrives at your retina the exact moment it was created in the core of the sun. From our perspective, it took almost a million years (about a million years to make it from the core to the convective region, then another few minutes to travel from there to Earth).