Personal Light Cone

[da]

OK, this is seriously geeky, but I love it:

Exhibit A: Distance of stars from us, in light-years, and other information.

Exhibit B: definition of Light Cone.

Exhibit C:Your Personal Light Cone RSS feed.

"From the moment of my birth, light (that I could have influenced) has been expanding around the Earth and light (which could influence me, from an increasing distance of origin) reaching it -- this ever-growing sphere of potential causality is my light cone." My light cone has 61 stars in it. The next star to be reached is Beta Leonis, 4 months from now.

Hat-tip to james_nicoll.

Comments

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

Ah, I see- check the definition. :) The cone-shape is provided by the time axis for visualization convenience.

In reality, there are three space dimensions, so the light would actually form an expanding or contracting sphere in 3D space rather than a circle in 2D, and the light cone would actually be a four-dimensional shape. However, the concept is easier to visualize with the number of spatial dimensions reduced from three to two. - wikipedia

..."Light hyper-cone" does have a certain ring to it though.

[http://users.livejournal.com/merle_/]

Ah, of course. Stupid me, I forgot about the time dimension.

Mmm.. light hyper-cones. "It's like a really fast and tasty ice cream cone, but not fattening!"