Posts tagged relativity
Neutrinos have extremely low masses, and it's quite easy for them to reach high energies and speeds. As such, it almost always makes sense to treat a neutrino as being relativistic. I've been doing...
A federation of alien spacefaring nations is doing basically the opposite of prime directive: they are jamming the Solar System, preventing us from leaving it. They are doing so by placing some de...
I am doing some hard sci-fi worldbuilding and really want to get as much correct as I can, but the effects of high sub-light speed travel on the travellers is doing my head in. I've pored literally...
I was looking at the diagram for a wormhole: A 2D plane is bent and then its ends are pinched together, creating a kind of 3D tunnel representation of what a 2D wormhole would be: This has made m...
Black holes are created by the gravitational collapse of massive stars. But in theory, black holes can also be created by any mass at all that is confined within a small enough volume of space, de...
At a constant 1G acceleration it takes a little less than a year to reach near light speed speeds. Time would dilate locally on the ship slowing time for them. Could the time dilation be pushed t...
I understand it might happen in a weak gravitational field. If I have twins on Earth, but one of them suddenly gets transported to intergalactic medium (without any great mass nearby), then the tra...
Premise Suppose an earth-like world in the near-future. Then aliens come and decide to play a mischievous trick on this world on an epic scale. The goal is to disrupt Earth's time by 18 minutes. S...
Most works of fiction have quite imaginative views of time travel. Mighty machines that teleport in time instead of space. Gaping portals in space that take you to another time. Mystical beings wit...
I was thinking about the classic beanpole design for interstellar travel. Wouldn't the Whipple shield need to be at least twice as wide as the ship is long to fully protect it from collisions with ...
I'm working on a simulator-type game which I want to be at least internally consistent, and which I'd like to work as close to reality as possible. That being said, it's set in space, which means t...
A Type II civilization on the Kardashev scale has decided to build a telescope. This civilization spans its home galaxy and wields vast energies capable of moving and shaping matter on the scale of...
Useless Backstory "Why are you waking me up Sergeant? And why did we enter near-light speed?" "We received a distress call, and there wasn't enough time to notify you, sir." "What kind of distress...
Cosmology since Einstein makes it clear that it's not quite right to say one body in space "revolves around" another, right? Einstein wrote: "The two sentences, 'the sun is at rest and the earth mo...
This question about time dilation got me thinking. The speed of an electron through copper is a whole heckofa lot slower than the speed of light, but if I understand the limits of relativity corre...
Imagine a planet - henceforth Planet X - that is orbiting very close to a black hole. The space-time distortion will be very high there and according to the theory of relativity, the time there wil...
So, I the question of what if a black hole hits the earth has been asked to death by various people, but what if the somewhat tamer wormhole hits the Earth? In particular, we'll say that one mouth...
I wish to clarify my doubts regarding time dilation Is it possible for a planet to be habitable like Edmund's planet from interstellar, which has somewhat similar gravitational force as Earth (9....
I am trying to build a hard science-fiction world where the interstellar travel might work like this: Travellers bodies are scanned and all relevant information regarding body structure, neural c...
Superheroes! Everybody loves them! (Though maybe not as much as magic.) The point is, I have a world with super heroes in it. I have a pretty good system of power granting, and have basically divid...
In ion drive, we use ionized gas. With particle accelerators, we use high-energy particles. Given that colliders expend huge amounts of energy to propell a handful of particles, I speculate the par...
I'm working on a science fiction story involving starships travelling about 95% of the speed of light. I wanted to have a reason for the starships to need to shield themselves against time dilation...
My understanding of special relativity is that a clock that flies one lap around the earth then returns to its starting position measures less time than a clock that "stayed put" relative to the ea...
Ships are capable of FTL warp and relativistic speed flying. In order for a ship to intercept other ship at high non-FTL speed, it needs a mechanism that will enable it to slow down the other ship....
Judy likes coffee. Right now he is standing in the middle of the urban park sipping it. Unbeknownst to him a local phenomena occurs somewhat near: space itself bends where a lovely group of lilies...
Here on Earth, time standardisation was enabled by the invention of accurate time pieces which allowed us to create a global constant (GMT/Zulu time) and regional offsets. If we travel outside our...
The type of economy where your mining operation takes years just to start yielding marketable product, let alone generate revenue, because the speed of light makes the economic feasibility of inter...
I was reading about the Riemannian Universe http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/ORTHOGONAL/00/PM.html I noticed that Greg Egan doesn't seem to talk about how Gravity would work in the Riemann...
I was thinking of a universe in which there is a relativity that is between Galilean and Lorentzian Relativity. In this universe there would be effects of length contraction and time dilation but ...
So I've got a bunch of freeze-dried colonists traveling in torpor to a solar system 55 light years away at 92% c. From an outsider's perspective it takes them sixty years to get there, but how long...
Imagine a human colony with the concept of an Earth day being transported somehow into the deep, deep space between galaxies. As we know, gravity wells affect the relative passage of time. So, in...
A spaceship of several kilometers length is accelerating to a very high fraction of $c$ (basically as close as they can possibly get). Which problems can the machinery and the crew encounter? And...
Prologue In my current worldbuilding project, I decided to put a ban for faster than lightspeed travel, and decided that most space flights be done in slower than lightspeed travels. Assuming effi...
So your star and/or planet gets hit by the CrushSun. The huge laser looks terrifying, but then you realize that the main weapon is the microblack hole it hit you with. What does it look like when ...
In a parallel universe if two objects occupy different positions in space then in the reference frame of each object the other has length contraction and time dilation. If the two objects are very...
In our universe if there are two objects that are moving relative to each other then each will see the other's length contracted in the direction of motion and it will see the others clocks running...
Okay, so humans are finally transitioning to a space-colonial society. We sent ships out, colonize worlds, etc... We aren't really in the business of sending multigenerational ships. Instead we use...
Background I have a character. He is the master of a particularly specific martial art that is pretty much only movement. But it's pretty powerful, in that he can separately: a) move in a manner t...
This was spawned from this question about Blueshifting (BS) when traveling near the speed of light. I had found this while learning about the other question. @99.99995 percent c And interes...
As I understand it, the principle of relativity was accepted from Galileo until Maxwell, whereupon the equations which predict constant speed of light imply a preferred reference frame in a Euclidi...
A super alien warrior goes training inside a gravity room. It's a room with a flat floor, but the surface gravity of the room can be modified at the push of a button. But under general relativity ...
