Length Contraction - Visual Effects

Visual Effects

Length contraction refers to measurements of position made at simultaneous times according to a coordinate system. This could naively lead to a thinking that if one could take a picture of a fast moving object, that the image would show the object contracted in the direction of motion. However, it is important to realize that such visual effects are completely different measurements, as such a photograph is taken from a distance, while length contraction can only directly be measured at the exact location of the object's endpoints. In 1959 Roger Penrose and James Terrell published papers demonstrating that length contraction instead actually shows up as elongation or even a rotation in a photographic image. This kind of visual rotation effect is called Penrose-Terrell rotation.

Read more about this topic:  Length Contraction

Famous quotes containing the words visual and/or effects:

    Dialogue should simply be a sound among other sounds, just something that comes out of the mouths of people whose eyes tell the story in visual terms.
    Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980)

    Virtues are not emotions. Emotions are movements of appetite, virtues dispositions of appetite towards movement. Moreover emotions can be good or bad, reasonable or unreasonable; whereas virtues dispose us only to good. Emotions arise in the appetite and are brought into conformity with reason; virtues are effects of reason achieving themselves in reasonable movements of the appetites. Balanced emotions are virtue’s effect, not its substance.
    Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–1274)