1

Please forgive me if this is a stupid question as I have a very rudimentary understanding of physics. I was reading about how the large hadron collider speeds up subatomic particles to near lightspeed and that the experimenters need to take the effects of time dilation into account because of this. This got me thinking and I came up with a strange thought experiment. Instead of subatomic particles, imagine we could send something like a small vehicle with a few people in it around the "track" (track seems like an inappropriate word but I'm not sure what it's actually called) at near light speed. So imagine they also have a high def webcam with them in the vehicle and that they wirelessly send a video to be broadcast on the internet. What would we see if we were to watch this video? Would they appear to us as if they were in super slow motion?

1 Answers1

0

If the webcam is directed onto a watch, you would see it ticking more slowly.

If the webcam is directed on the outside, you will see the normal speed of happenings, e.g. it would show you the same number of rounds as you have seen by looking at the vehicle.
Only it would have to be a very fast webcam, otherwise you would see less frames per second.

And it probably would have to be a magical webcam, since the usual connection to a WLAN would probably not work. But I'm not sure about the engineering details. (Well, I'm sure it would break from the acceleration, so it has to be magical anyways)

Well, and besides, you would see the world distorted, everything shifted to the forward direction, and brighter there and less bright backwards. Just like the pictures you find on the internet, e.g. here

Ilja
  • 2,553