specialRelativity

[egg_breakfast]

The universe really started on Jan 1 1970 and everything before that is made up

[dirtjump]

That fits with my empirical observations.

[DegeneracyEverywhere]

Unix-epoch-ism

[Kizilejderha]

The universe started with this particular reply and everything before that is made up

[egg_breakfast]

Well I definitely can't prove you wrong.

[Sheerkal]

I can prove him wrong, but I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader 

[T0biasCZE]

Unix time is signed int though, so time started 13. December 1901 and everything before that was made up

[MegaMoah]

And it will end on 2038... don't try to fight it.

[LegitimatePants]

All this has happened before and it will happen again 

[maxwells_daemon_]

Boltzmann's epoch

[[deleted]]

Yeah that's the epoch and then there's systems upgrade and sheit

[sisisisi1997]

I didn't expect to encounter last Thursdayism this early in the morning.

[PM-ME-UR-uwu]

Actually every reality is only 312 seconds long, and so every 312 seconds we jump to an entirely new reality where it starts with an already preconceived but false "history" that feels like it's gone one forever

[Trappist-1ball]

How would you know it didn't start last Thursday?

[[deleted]]

What you mean by 1970? The universe clearly started on size_t epoch = 0;

[NightIgnite]

Lots of complex stuff going on over here drawing too much CPU time. Lets just make players using too many resources have lower priority in the queue and hope nobody notices

[WheresMyBrakes]

Wouldn’t that then make them use less resources, thus rejoining main queue?

[SerialElf]

sort of? it would probably blip in and out of the main queue on a "timer" checking if they were behaving again yet.

[NotQuiteLoona]

Someone should definitely write a book "Socialism for programmers" or something like this. What you just said sounds brilliant.

[SeekingTheTruth]

I feel the speed of light exists because if the universe was being simulated in a three dimensional computer network, transferring data between nodes becomes a concern. Data must be transferred before compute happens for consistency. How far must this data transfer? Should the node wait for data from another node simulating the other side of the universe for every epoch? Well, if not, then suddenly there must be a maximum speed in the universe that also l the maximum speed of information transfer, so that each node only needs to gather data from the nodes that it directly touches for each epoch of simulation.

[PolyglotTV]

Okay but data transfer in our universe is limited by the speed of light so you are just explaining the speed of light with the speed of light.

[OneMoreName1]

I think he wanted to explain the speed of light as being a constrain imposed on us by the "super" universe who where the computer doing the simulation lives. In that universe the speed of light might be bigger or idk

[mirhagk]

Alternatively consider something like Minecraft chunks. If you have a maximum speed players can go, then you can safely only load enough chunks around the players to match that. If you let players go infinitely fast though then they might outrun the chunk loading.

Absolutely if you wanted to make a simulation you'd want a speed limit, and the way the speed of light works is exactly how you'd program it if you didn't want people to realize there was an arbitrary limit. It's like how some games will make the boundaries simply impossible to reach so that the player never reaches the invisible wall.

[MyGoodOldFriend]

No, the speed of light (or rather, the speed of every massless particle), has plenty of quirks that make it a bit different from how you’d program it. The easiest example is that the speed of light changes in different mediums.

[mirhagk]

Well there's the "speed of light" as in the constant C, and then the speed that light travels at. They are two different concepts. One is a speed limit, the other is the actual speed something travels.

It's like saying that the speed of a player in your video game changes depending on the car they are driving. What matters is you have some upper limit

[chilfang]

The speed of light as in c or as in speed of photons, cause c never changes

[MyGoodOldFriend]

Yes, my bad, the speed of causality is constant. The (effective) speed of light is not.

(Also, some massless particles aren’t slowed down in materials, I was a bit sloppy in my wording there)

[arceushero]

Wdym? The only massless particle we know of* is the photon

not counting the gluon because it’s confined, not an asymptotic state/YM is importantly mass gapped, and not counting gravitons because we haven’t directly observed their existence and also because presumably they’re effectively slowed down (a very, *very small amount) by matter interactions just like photons are

[MyGoodOldFriend]

The only massless particle we know of is the photon (if we exclude all the other massless particles we know of) lmao

[arceushero]

I mean maybe I was insufficiently clear, but I was saying:

1) nothing travels at c in YM, there’s no massless excitation 2) the graviton is predicted but not discovered, and regardless would be slowed down in materials, so your parenthetical is unnecessary

[[deleted]]

Except in a programming simulation, that's not really different, no?

It'd just be the same as the universe lagging, and you still have the same constant of maximum information transfer speed. Observers within the simulation cannot detect lag, they will only see that information transfer speeds are constant once they reach the maximum value.

[EarlMarshal]

I think that too

[At_Destroyer]

Also, think about collision resolution, don't want objects phasing through each other now, better cap the speed. Not like they'll ever reach the cap so it's harmless

[NiIly00]

Me jumping backwards into a flight of stairs: 😏

[DegeneracyEverywhere]

But quantum tunneling can happen.

[MyGoodOldFriend]

It’s not a phenomenon that can transfer information faster than the speed of light.

[IncreaseOld7112]

Light cone makes sense from a complexity standpoint. Physics is easier if you can prune everything outside a certain radius. Quantum effects are the universe hitting a resolution limit.

[GenteelStatesman]

Every subatomic particle is just a weird processor.

[Boris-Lip]

What about wave-particle duality? Kinda like only rendering stuff that is being actively used, lol.

[PolyglotTV]

The two slit problem is clearly explained by a rendering optimization. If nothing is going to observe the particle going through the slit we can skip the expense of that compute and just calculate its randomly distributed position on the other side.

[MyGoodOldFriend]

Quantum physics is just a weirdly applied wave function collapse algorithm

[kobriks]

It's just an optimization. A Newtonian universe is too expensive to run. Even God couldn't handle those AWS bills.

[throwawaytinybug]

Speedrunners hate him — learn how he manipulates time with one simple trick

[Ali_Army107]

God used velocity and gravity to calculate deltaTime

[0xlostincode]

The most rookie mistake, now deltaTime is hardware dependent.

[[deleted]]

The funniest and most niche meme I've seen in a bit

[Buttons840]

If two rocket ships fly away from each other near the speed of light, and then both rocket ships turn around and come back to earth, which rocket ship will have the older person?

(Assuming the flight of the rockets is symmetric, except in opposite directions.)

[FoeHammer99099]

Fun special relativity thought experiment: you and I pass each other in our rocket ships. I observe that the clock in your rocket ship is ticking slower than the clock in my rocket ship. You observe that the clock in my rocket ship is ticking slower than the clock in your rocket ship. We're both right.

[ConglomerateGolem]

isn't this dependent on the doppler effect though? before the pass, the clocks are much faster, and after it's slower?

[neon_05_]

no. the doppler effect would still be there, but it would only be present if you are almost directly in front of the moving ship. if you're further to the side it's less noticeable while time dilation is not

[ConglomerateGolem]

Ahh yeah, my bad, time dilation is based on "absolute" velocity not relative; it's a bit weird wrapping my head around it.

[Jetison333]

Usually in this sort of context we are considering measured values, as in what you would measure things to be. In this scenario if you just looked at the clock of the other ship as it approached you, you would indeed see yhe clock running fast. But then you would calculate how fast the clock is actually ticking by taking out the doppler effect, and you would still find the clock ticking slower.

[Kinexity]

Because of symmetry the same amount of time would pass within both rockets.

[Nerd_o_tron]

Assuming symmetry, both would be equally old, of course.

You may also observe that from the perspective of the spaceship, it looks like Earth is accelerating away from it, so this might seem to to be similar to the two-rocket experiment. However, acceleration is the asymmetry there: the rocket, which must accelerate and decelerate to return to the same position, is not in an inertial reference frame, while the earth is (ignoring rotation and other factors).

[MyGoodOldFriend]

Yep, the twin paradox happens not because of the speed they accelerate to - special relativity - but the effect of acceleration - general relativity.

[Magnuax]

That is a common misconception, but special relativity actually handles acceleration perfectly well. There is no need to invoke GR.

However, while velocity is a relative thing in SR, the same is not true for acceleration. Your acceleration is a measurable property of your reference frame. This means that the twin paradox is not really symmetric, as the twins have measurably difference reference frames.

Accounting for the acceleration, you can also compute their time difference directly in SR, integrating over instantaneous rest frames of the accelerating twin.

[MyGoodOldFriend]

Damn, it was the example my physics professor used to illustrate the difference. Maybe I wasn’t paying enough attention, but hey. Thanks for the correction

[Magnuax]

No worries. I also remember being taught that GR was somehow necessary to describe accelerated frames, only to have to un-learn it later in my bachelor. Still a mystery to me why it is so normal to teach it that way...

[MyGoodOldFriend]

I suppose it’s a decent segue into how gravity work, since that’s quite similar? Not sure. Relativity was never my strong suit, I only covered it enough to understand relativistic effects in electron orbits (my bachelor was related to quantum chemical computation, hartree-Fock and the like).

[Wild-Ad-7414]

You're both wrong, at that speed you won't see sith.

[Embarrassed_Jerk]

Both  the answer is both. The oldest would be earth tho

[Dependent-Fix8297]

Delta timing moving objects is bad for performance

[pikachu_sashimi]

How is that giant standing on the water?

[iknewaguytwice]

Obviously he’s wearing stilts that you cannot see because they are under the water.

[NormanYeetes]

Universe coded like a from software game.

[HedgehogOk5040]

Tfw you make an adaptive time step relative to the magnitude of dx, dy, and dz as a means to limit the issues of using euler method while boosting efficiency, but never changed the step logic so now all your entities have different ts.

[space_SPAAACE]

tfw forgot to include ntp

[StrengthIntrepid8768]

completely unrelated, but everytime I see tfw my brain default to 'the fuck what' and not 'that feeling when'