What If Light Was Really Slow?

It's funny to think that all of these effects do happen in the real world, but at such tiny magnitudes we could never notice them.

Anyone who wants more like this should play "a slower speed of light" a short physics game that explores alot of these concepts!

I can only imagine what if Albert Einstein was alive to see computer simulations like this, what would be his reaction to the consequences of his work. Amazing video!

“I’m not bad at drawing perspective, I’m just… experimenting with lower speeds of light.”

This makes me appreciate the fact that light is essentially instantaneous in our day to day lives- as in not really discernible with our naked eye.

Would love to see some of these things taken into account for VFX around near-lightspeed and faster-than-light vehicles in movies

I think what would've been great is to show a side-by-side comparison between the slowed light and the normal lighting.

It's kinda crazy that we've evolved to collect and process such great amounts of information just by picking up on particles bouncing off of each other.

If you've ever read the Three Body Problem series this is not only a great visualization but it also recontextualizes the horror of reduced light speed zones.

There's only one thing I want to see out of this concept that I haven't yet: Making light also experience gravity like it does in real life. Basically, on a flat world, if you look up at 45 degrees, that's the furthest you can see, and looking higher is like looking back down at you, until you can finally see yourself directly above you. Edit: I only said on a flat world to assume the earth is flat for the 45° number to make sense. In reality, the earth is not flat, it is spherish, so it's not exactly 45°. I love all the pedantic people online.

This explanation is similar to the one I encountered in 'A Slower Speed Of Light' which is basically a relativistic fun game that slows the speed of light to the speed of a stroll. I understand that just because we can't reach the speed of light, it does not mean we cannot know the effects of light speed. In 'A Slower Speed Of Light', the speed of light is brought down to a human level so we can experience the special effects of relativity and this video does the same. Nice 👍 I like it ❤

It gets fun when those movements come to a sudden stop too; the buildings nearby stop soonest, and the distortion unwraps in concentric rings - so the parts of the buildings further away appear to continue moving until the distortion is removed in the static state.

watching this I thought you would have had millions of subscribers, this is insanely high quality!

MIT made a game about light slowing down, with light shifts and warping buildings and all. I think it was called "The Slower Speed of Light?" Really fun.

And thus, everyone was horribly irradiated.

This video is so well made for the channel size. You deserve the million man, keep it up.

I remember the light Doppler effect being a thing people discuss when talking about black holes and why with rotating black holes, one "side" (the half of the black hole's disc that is moving towards the viewer) will always be brighter than the other (which is moving away) creating a sort of "false star" in the accretion disk; it was incredibly cool to see this effect explained in detail and explored in motion in a way that is very easy to understand and to see how it affects mundane objects, especially the bending of the city! that part is also visually incredibly beautiful, a true piece of art in several shots. thank you so much for this!! excellent work!

This really makes me think about how the conditions of earth and the universe are just right, for life to exist and feel the way it is. Thank you for this beautiful upload

This is such a good video omg Describing it as “the ‘visual’ doppler effect” was THE thing that made it all suddenly fall into place in my head. Thanks a ton for this great explanation and demonstration!! I feel like i can intuit a lot more “speed of light” hypotheticals now (like those ones when people explain special relativity where someone is on a lightspeed train and shining a flashlight at you, who is not moving at all)

As someone who writes gamecode and shaders I'm very impressed at the effects you've achieved here, this must've been done at the level of how the rasterizer and geometry look-up works if I'm not mistaken, all of my GG's.