Une longue vidéo pour illustrer la lenteur de la vitesse de la lumière à l’échelle de l’univers : à 300 000 km/s il nous faut déjà 45 minutes pour seulement atteindre Jupiter.
Le tout sur une musique de Steve Reich rend le voyage assez trippant.
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.
Riding Light from Alphonse Swinehart on Vimeo.