Relativistic Effects - Eric Braun

PHYS 210 PROJECTS --> here

I'm not too sure just what I would be able to model, given my knowledge of physics and my ability in Linux. However, my main thought was to write a program which can model the relativistic effects of travel in different frames of reference - length contraction, time dilation, and similar topics in special relativity, depending on how easy this is to model. Coincidentally enough, this might be very helpful in Physics 210, although it'd be too late by the time this program is written.

I presume you mean PHYS 200 (above). It would indeed be a helpful tool in that course, but the process of learning how to do it would probably help even more! (One goal of computer tools is to relieve the user of the necessity of understanding the details -- this is not an advantage when your objective is to understand better.) Anyway, this has been a popular Project topic in the past, but the problem is always the same: what do you want your program to do? It is trivial to write a code that will return the time, position and velocity of an event in a moving frame, given its time, position and velocity in some other frame; you'll want to do something more ambitious, like draw a picture of an extended object and show its motion as viewed in two frames, or (my favourite) show the view of a galaxy as seen from a relativistic spaceship as a movie [speeded up]; but this quickly gets difficult. So you need to turn your imagination loose first and try to visualize the finished product at work. Not so easy with counterintuitive stuff like STR! But a potentially excellent topic. -- Jess 09:46, 20 September 2008 (PDT)