Many-fingered time

[mmcirvin]

The Khronos Projector lets you time-shift parts of a video image by poking it.

I like the very carefully worded statements on the site about relativity, which make me think that these people also know their physics. The ArsTechnica post that pointed me to it suggested that it "shows space-time as deformable", but what it actually engages more directly is the notion of the arbitrariness of embedding of "equal-time" surfaces in space-time, a constant stumbling block in talking about black holes and cosmology. Messing with this thing might be useful as an intuition-builder in that regard.

Comments

[pentomino.livejournal.com]

I can't figure out what codec it wants.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

They're actually a little too timid about the applicability of the device to relativity demonstrations. I think you actually could explore relativity paradoxes effectively by replacing the ordinary video with special animations stretching out time such that the light cones are at 45 degrees in the cube.