Physicists in Vienna have recreated a bizarre visual illusion from Einstein’s relativity the Terrell-Penrose effect by simulating slow light speeds with lasers and cameras.
A fast-moving cube appears twisted, as predicted over 60 years ago.
Relativity Gets Weird at Light-Speed
When things move really, really fast, close to the speed of light, our everyday ideas about space and time start to break down. This is the heart of Einstein’s special theory of relativity. Objects actually shrink in length as they speed up, and time flows differently for them than it does for someone watching from the outside. Sounds wild, but it’s been confirmed by countless experiments.
But there’s one mind-bending prediction of relativity that had never been seen, until now. It’s called the Terrell-Penrose effect, and it says that super-fast objects shouldn’t just look shorter, they should look rotated. Back in 1959, physicists James Terrell and Roger Penrose came to this conclusion independently. And now, for the very first time, scientists in Vienna have managed to visually recreate this strange illusion using high-speed cameras and laser pulses, by slowing down light itself to just 2 meters per second in a clever lab setup.
The Faster You Go, the Shorter You Look
“Suppose a rocket whizzes past us at ninety per cent of the speed of light. For us, it no longer has the same length as before it took off, but is 2.3 times shorter,” explains Prof. Peter Schattschneider from TU Wien. This is the relativistic length contraction, also known as the Lorentz contraction.
However, this contraction cannot be photographed. “If you wanted to take a picture of the rocket as it flew past, you would have to take into account that the light from different points took different lengths of time to reach the camera,” explains Peter Schattschneider. The light coming from different parts of the object and arriving at the lens or our eye at the same time was not emitted at the same time – and this results in complicated optical effects.
Relativity’s Illusion: A Rotated Cube
Let’s imagine that the super-fast object is a cube. Then the side facing away from us is further away than the side facing towards us. If two photons reach our eye at the same time, one from the front corner of the cube and one from the back corner, the photon from the back corner has traveled further. So it must have been emitted at an earlier time. And at that time, the cube was not at the same position as when the light was emitted from the front corner.
“This makes it look to us as if the cube had been rotated,” says Peter Schattschneider. This is a combination of relativistic length contraction and the different travel times of light from different points. Together, this leads to an apparent rotation, as predicted by Terrell and Penrose.
Of course, this is irrelevant in everyday life, even when photographing an extremely fast car. Even the fastest Formula One car will only move a tiny fraction of the distance in the time difference between the light emitted by the side of the car facing away from us and the side facing towards us. But with a rocket traveling close to the speed of light, this effect would be clearly visible.
Recreating Relativity in a Lab
Technically, it is currently impossible to accelerate rockets to a speed at which this effect could be seen in a photograph. However, the group led by Peter Schattschneider from USTEM at TU Wien found another solution inspired by art: they used extremely short laser pulses and a high-speed camera to recreate the effect in the laboratory.
“We moved a cube and a sphere around the lab and used the high-speed camera to record the laser flashes reflected from different points on these objects at different times,” explained Victoria Helm and Dominik Hornof, the two students who carried out the experiment. “If you get the timing right, you can create a situation that produces the same results as if the speed of light were no more than 2 meters per second.”
Snapshots Across Time Reveal the Impossible
It is easy to combine images of different parts of a landscape into one large image. What has been done here for the first time is to include the time factor: the object is photographed at many different times. Then the areas illuminated by the laser flash at the moment when the light would have been emitted from that point if the speed of light was only 2 m/s are combined into one still image. This makes the Terrell-Penrose effect visible.
“We combined the still images into short video clips of the ultra-fast objects. The result was exactly what we expected,” says Peter Schattschneider. “A cube appears twisted, a sphere remains a sphere, but the North Pole is in a different place.”
Website: International Research Awards on High Energy Physics and Computational Science.
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