Weird idea but I wonder if there are ways to take this from "crazy tech" to "hard tech".
Weird idea but I wonder if there are ways to take this from "crazy tech" to "hard tech".
The Sun. Literally.
Satellites have to be that far for the Einstein ring to be bigger than the apparent size of the solar disk.
Edit: to make it a bit more clear, the gravitational lens does not quite behave like a normal lens. Instead, you see the light from _behind_ the object. So if you're too close to the lensing object so that the Einstein ring is not larger than it, you'll just see a part of the object to be a bit more bright.
Also, the gravitational lens does not actually _focus_ the image, it distorts it into a band around the lensing object.
Or to put it another way: A gravity lens bends space so that the light from behind an object curves around it while travelling straight.
You are bending the dimension, the light travels straight through a bent dimension thus coming out curved.
I think that's mindblowing.
Stronger gravity around massive objects causes slow down of the part of a light wave closer to object, compared to outer part.
This difference in speed, caused by _interaction_ between the photon and gravitational field of the body, results in the bending of the light's trajectory.
Bending of spacetime is just a simplification of this process to model that easier.
Light doesn't travel in a straight line because, to change trajectory of photon, photon must interact with something to exchange momentum. You are talking about mathematical model[1].
c is an universal constant and it seems that you're saying that it is not!
I cannot read your mind.
> c is an universal constant and it seems that you're saying that it is not!
Yep, c is universal constant for many physical models.
In physical world, c is constant as long, as properties of physical vacuum (permitivity and permeability) are constant, which in turn depends on α (Fine-structure constant[1]), which, in turn, variates at higher energies[2].