Relativity & Spacetime
Time Dilation, Curvature & Warp
Special Relativity
Time Dilation, Length Contraction & the Light Cone
Einstein's flat-spacetime framework. Why moving clocks tick slowly, why moving rulers shrink, and how the light cone divides past, future, and the unreachable elsewhere.
The Equivalence Principle
Acceleration as Gravity & Curved Spacetime
Why a sealed lift accelerating in deep space is locally indistinguishable from one sitting on Earth. The conceptual leap from special to general relativity, and how mass curves the geometry around it.
Gravitational Time Dilation
Clocks Deep in Gravity Wells
Time runs slower near mass. Compares clocks on Earth's surface, GPS satellites, neutron stars, and just outside a black hole's event horizon — and why GPS would fail without relativistic correction.
Gravitational Lensing
Light Bending & Einstein Rings
Mass bends the path of light. Animated lensing of background stars by a foreground compact object, showing arcs, multiple images, and the symmetric Einstein ring of perfect alignment.
Black Hole Spacetime
Event Horizons, Ergospheres & Frame Dragging
The geometry of Schwarzschild and Kerr black holes. Event horizon, photon sphere, ISCO, and the rotating ergosphere where spacetime itself is dragged faster than light around the singularity.
Warp & Wormholes
Alcubierre Drives, ER Bridges & the FSD
The speculative physics of faster-than-light travel. Alcubierre's warp metric, Einstein–Rosen bridges, exotic matter requirements, and how Elite Dangerous's Frame Shift Drive plays with these ideas.
This module is the geometry beneath every other simulation. Stars, planets, and orbits all live inside a spacetime that bends, stretches, and dilates in the presence of mass and motion.
It also doubles as the physics backdrop for Elite Dangerous's signature trick — the Frame Shift Drive — a piece of in-universe engineering that borrows freely from real general relativity.