"Once we have self-driving cars, wipers will no longer be essential, because the car doesn't need a clean windshield to drive. "Making a typo in an online argument is the equivalent of voice cracking in a verbal argument." This all leads us to an uncomfortable conclusion: At the actual speed of light, time would cease to progress and space would be infinitely compressed.- u/ItsHerox Pixar Animation Studios / Via 4. Using the same example, a Glock-size pistol, which is 7.36 inches when stationary, would contract to be 0.033 inches when moving at 99.999% the speed of light from the perspective of an outside observer. As something approaches the speed of light (like our Glock-sized pistol), time goes slower for that object compared to time experienced by an outside observer - if both the thing that launched the pistol and the pistol itself had a clock, much less time would have passed by for the clock on the gun compared to the stationary clock.Īnother thing that happens is that as an object moves faster and faster, it is compressed along the axis of its direction of movement. Time dilation is one such transformation. Many of these things are referred to as Lorentz transformations - and they are quirky mathematical (but directly observed) solutions to the paradoxical truth that light is a constant speed no matter your frame of reference or speed of its source. Lots of weird crap happens when you approach the speed of light. That’s the equivalent of 272,626 Hiroshima-size nuclear explosions. For context, it would take 1.711x10 19 joules to get a Glock-size pistol (855 grams) to go 99.999% the speed of light. Long story short: We can't experience it, but just by studying their eyes, we can tell how far a certain bird could see clearly, how wide its field of vision is, and what wavelengths of light it can see.įirst things first: You can’t make anything that has mass go the speed of light - it would take an infinite amount of energy to do so (thanks, Einstein). Their photoreceptors are often much deeper, which means they can magnify their vision more than humans. While humans have three photopigments in their eyes, birds can have four or five, and have a greater diversity of cones than humans. Their pupils are also much bigger, which means more light reaches the retina. Birds have eye sockets that can take up to 50% of the space of their entire skull. For one thing, their overall eyes are much bigger on both a relative and absolute scale. But these features are a bit different in birds. We can do this because bird's eyes work, generally, the same way as ours do: with rods, cones, lenses, pupils, etc. We can't have direct knowledge of what the ~experience~ of that vision would be, but we can deduce what its characteristics would look like just like an optometrist can tell you what a certain kind of lens will do to a person's vision without actually experiencing their vision. Not only is avian vision more powerful in most cases, most birds can also see into the UV light spectrum in addition to the visual spectrum humans are used to. An eagle's vision, for example, is estimated to be around four to eight times more powerful than a human's. It is true that many birds, and birds of prey in particular, have much better eyesight than humans.
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