jack@cs.hw.ac.uk (Jack Campin) (12/08/87)
A long time ago I read about a program developed at MIT that produced images of the way ordinary scenes (a street) would look at speeds nearing c. I don't know if it used a plotter or calligraphic display, but it was so long ago that whatever it did should surely be possible now in real time on a Mac or equivalent. Does anything like that exist? - a sort of flight simulator for cosmic ray particles, that would let you define a scene with a 3D graphics editor and then look at it at various fractions of c. (Colour would be a nice optional extra). The MIT program produced weirdly drooping lampposts. More ambitiously: what about general relativity? Here I am thinking about some of the descriptions in Kaufmann's "The Cosmic Frontiers of General Relativity" about how the world would look from near a black hole. -- ARPA: jack%cs.glasgow.ac.uk@nss.cs.ucl.ac.uk JANET:jack@uk.ac.glasgow.cs USENET: ...mcvax!ukc!cs.glasgow.ac.uk!jack Mail: Jack Campin, Computing Science Department, University of Glasgow, 17 Lilybank Gardens, Glasgow G12 8QQ, Scotland (041 339 8855 x 6045)
leonard@bucket.UUCP (Leonard Erickson) (12/17/87)
A long time ago, I read a book dealing with Relativity, interstellar travel and like subjects. In it was a form of the relativistiic Doppler shift equation that I have seen nowhere else. I had copied it down but a few years later it and a number of other useful but obscure formulas were lost when someone stole my briefcase and the notebook with the formulas. What this formula (or pair of formulas, it's been 20 years and things are rather fuzzy) gave was not only the frequency shift, but the angular shift for objects that were at an angle to the direction of travel. As I never got much past algebra it is somewhat impratical for me to attempt to derive the equation myself. If someone has such a formula would they please mail it to me? Thank you. -- Leonard Erickson ...!tektronix!reed!percival!bucket!leonard CIS: [70465,203] "I used to be a hacker. Now I'm a 'microcomputer specialist'. You know... I'd rather be a hacker."