This is Lightspeed despite the fact that nothing on the screen is moving we are traveling faster than 300 million meters per second in this footage and compensating for all the visual effects that traveling at Lightspeed would produce here’s some different footage of Lightspeed near a binary system you’ll Notice there are no stars or galaxies whizzing by just the same static sky you see when you look up at night I’ll be it a little prettier by human standards Lightspeed is practically instant by cosmic standards it’s a snail’s pace so I wanted to see what the speed of light would be by Minecraft standards I ran into some technical difficulties but I was able to succeed although it’s not exactly sustainable I’d like to go into details but that requires some knowledge about this topic we call Lightspeed the top speed of light is almost 300 million meters per second why does it go that Fast that’s still a mystery but we do know that it’s not the only thing that moves at that speed gravity is another common example of something that moves at light speed for example if the Sun were to disappear not only would we see light for more than eight minutes but we’d continue to Rotate around nothing for more than eight minutes after which we would promptly be flung into space so if it’s not a property of light that determines the universal speed limit then what does the short answer is that we really don’t know but a simple experiment can be used To illustrate how a limit like this might be operating in the real world here we have a runner who wants to get from point A to point B walking he gets there in 4.3 seconds running in 3.6 flying in 2.3 if we extrapolate this pattern it appears as though his time Will always improve with more speed but as we know Lightspeed is the fastest you can travel so to illustrate this limit we’re going to put doors every few blocks that open at set intervals like real life the slower speeds aren’t affected but as you start cranking up The speeds the end times start to look very similar this way it doesn’t matter how fast our runner goes his speed could be 5 billion meters per second but his travel time would always be limited to the rate at which doors open it’s not a perfect metaphor but the Point is the speed of light is not the speed limit set by light itself but rather it’s the rate that the universe allows stuff to move through it think of it like this the concept we call light speed is the rate the doors of our universe open no Matter how much energy you put into acceleration the door is always open at the same speed that is the speed of light as of right now our doors are 20 blocks apart and are opening at one-second intervals essentially a light speed for this experiment is 20 meters Per second in order to get up to actual light speed in Minecraft each door would need to be 299,792,458 blocks apart and we would need to go between them in the same amount of time one second unfortunately the maximum distance between two points along a straight line Of blocks in a Minecraft world is 60 million meters you can’t go any further than that you run into an invisible wall so at 60 million meters you would need to travel across five entire minecraft worlds in one second in order to go the speed of light we can’t do that but we Can travel across one Minecraft world in one fifth of a second all that requires is a simple mod that increases movement speed so let’s place our doors Kraig up our speed and watch the magic happen if this you came here to see don’t blink because it’s going to be quick did you Catch that you might have thought it would look something like this the world blazing by underneath you at supersonic speeds but in reality this is far too slow but we actually get is just six frames each 110 million meters apart even at a fraction of the speed may as Well just be a slideshow but my craft is just a video game right now much land can you really fit inside a piece of software actually earth is only about 40 million meters in circumference which is 33% less than one of our five minecraft worlds in fact Earth is so small that if You were a beam of light coming from the Sun and traveling through our atmosphere this is all you would see of Earth before venturing past our planet our system and likely our galaxy at the speed you have a fraction of a second to observe the only path Of universe we’ve ever known life to exist once that’s out of sight it would take you over fifty thousand years just to reach the edge of our galaxy once that’s gone well you’d be too far away from any other galaxy to see any light so you probably end up with a pretty Spectacular view of nothing until the end of time Video Information
This video, titled ‘Light Speed: From Minecraft to Reality’, was uploaded by spumwack on 2014-03-21 22:00:01. It has garnered 1335078 views and 37952 likes. The duration of the video is 00:05:31 or 331 seconds.
Science and videogames! Together!
Minecraft can be a great tool for visualizing complicated subjects, such as the speed of light (aka “c”). Using a straight track and simple math, we can see how the universe might be limiting speeds for very fast things, such as light.
The “doors” metaphor is admittedly, imperfect. While they do limit speed outside of “acceleration”, they falsely imply that there is something “in space” that slows things down, which does not appear to be the case at the moment. The actual mechanisms that limit objects to light speed will be the topic for a future video. (Hint: It has to do with time!)
Space Engine: http://en.spaceengine.org/