jwz: 24-May-2016 (Tue)

In our terrestrial view of things, the speed of light seems incredibly fast. But as soon as you view it against the vast distances of the universe, it's unfortunately very slow. This animation illustrates, in realtime, the journey of a photon of light emitted from the surface of the sun and traveling across a portion of the solar system, from a human perspective.
I've taken liberties with certain things like the alignment of planets and asteroids, as well as ignoring the laws of relativity concerning what a photon actually "sees" or how time is experienced at the speed of light, but overall I've kept the size and distances of all the objects as accurate as possible. I also decided to end the animation just past Jupiter as I wanted to keep the running length below an hour.

Previously, previously, previously, previously.

12 Comments

Tags: mpegs, space

Robots

7 years ago

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Geoff

I played a game at Maker Faire where I tried to identify the exact second that builders began tuning me out as I tried to sell them on the idea of entering the Cocktail Robotics competition.

Was it when they realized it wasn't in a South Bay parking lot at 1pm?

Most of the eyes-glazing-over occurred when I mentioned it was at an actual venue.

Oh, one guy mentioned that there's a robot builders meeting happening at Google campus on Wednesday. I gave him a dozen flyers, and he said he would try to hand them off, but I'd wager they just ended up in the trash when I left.

So full of "why the fuck do I even bother" right now.

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So look, if you think you might be attending some event where people who build robots might be interested in entering our goofy little contest, and you think they might be people who don't all think that "trying" is so 2010, I'd love to give you a stack of flyers and posters to take with you.