The Internet offers the ideal medium for the publication of a relativistic flight simulator, and there are now a few websites around which will show you what you will see travelling near the speed of light. Here are the known sites divided into categories in alphabetical order within each category. We will apologise for a slight bias: the compiler is a DOS man and not a Unix man. He is also no expert on General Relativity.
There are two ways to manage the business of relativistic flight simulation. The first way is to download a program which runs on your computer, and the second way is to generate the images on a remote computer and download pictures or animations. The websites which appear below have therefore been divided into three categories. In the first category are programs which run on your computer. In the third category are programs which are definitely for a remote supercomputer. The second category is the in-between category, which a university physics department may be able to cope with, but which are probably not for private individuals. This division is intended as a rough guide only.
This page has been produced partly as a publicity vehicle for the computer simulation of physics in general, and there is a companion GATEWAY TO PHYSICS where other simulations may be found.
The speed of light is about 300,000 kilometres per second. We might ask what the world would look like if it were reduced to something like 30 kilometres per hour, and this is a valid question. The physics would be the same, but we would get a new view of everyday scenes. This is the theme of some ofthe websites listed below.
Websites in this category are kind to slow modems.
Mark Hale's flight through a grid
This program, which you can download, requires two support files, OPENGL32.DLL and GLU32.DLL, which exist in different versions for Windows 95 and Windows NT. You can find these files on this site, or you can get them from Henley Quadling's gravitational many-body website, which suggests that acquiring these files is a worthwhile investment if you don't have them already. An OS/2 version is also available.
Here is the 'Star Trek' simulator. You can watch moving stars which change colour in accordance with the Doppler effect. In one ZIP file you will find both C++ source code and compiled object code.
Schools and colleges should be aware that you can download this program in Windows, and then run a copy of it on a DOS computer.
A simple relativistic flight simulator showing motion along a street of boxes written in Microsoft QBasic which you can download and run. You can either run interpreted source code, or compiled object code which is better. This site is mainly about quantum mechanics and there are other QBasic programs on a variety of topics. The relativistic flight simulator is someway down the QBasic programs page. This program ends by pointing you in the direction of the author's GATEWAY TO PHYSICS.
Schools and colleges should be aware that you can download this program in Windows, and then run a copy of it on a DOS computer.
Demonstration of temporal consequences of relativistic travel. JAVA source code is also available outside the JAVA system, so if you have a JAVA compiler you can run the simulation at a higher speed. Any relativistic flight simulator written in JAVA would do well to follow this example.
Any university physics department can surely cope.
This site shows you relativistic flights through both random starfields and cubical grids of stars with plenty of GIF images. You can run the source code with the right equipment.
This site deals with relativistic ray-tracing and shows animations of moving grids in FLI or MPEG format.
This site shows MPEG movies of a virtual trip to a Black Hole and an ultracompact Neutron Star. A hypertext version of an American Journal of Physics article published about these movies is also available.
This site shows a relativistic journey through Stonehenge, a prehistoric circle of stones in South West England.
This ambitious-looking website is still under construction. You can play an MPEG movie or view GIF stills from the movie.
QuickTime Movie of relativistic flight over a city.
This is a big website with many different relativity exhibits with the emphasis on General Relativity. There are MPEG and QuickTime movies to view of Black Holes, etc...
This shows you MPEG movies of pulsars and Black Holes. German and English text.
Tutorial on various aspects of relativity. Requires MS-DOS or DR-DOS and at least an 80386. Shareware.
Schools and colleges should be aware that you can download this program in Windows, and then run a copy of it on a DOS computer.
RODS.BAS shows two moving rods passing each other. They each have the Fitzgerald contraction, and emit flashes of light as the ends coincide, showing the relativity of simultaneity. This is a very simple program which you could surely write yourself having heard only a description. RELAY.BAS deals with the impossibility of superluminal communication. It is really aimed at the topic of quantum mechanics, the author's main interest.
Schools and colleges should be aware that you can download these programs in Windows, and then run copies of them on a DOS computer.
If you want to suggest another site then please contact the compiler on 100425.3501@compuserve.com . It is recommended that any new sites be registered also with TIPTOP. If you have produced a JAVA site then make sure you feature also in TIPTOP's VLAB. It is suggested that you also submit to Infoseek and AltaVista.
Yahoo has sections on relativity and relativistic travel which are worth a look.
Try searching for relativistic flight simulator on a search engine such as MetaCrawler to see if anything has been missed.
To find this page, it is useful to know that the 'magic words' are relativistic flight simulator. A preliminary list of magic words for other topics in physics may be viewed by clicking here.
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