In his classic science-fiction story “The New Accelerator,” published in 1901, H. G. Wells describes a drug that speeds up a person’s metabolism by a factor of 1,000. For the two protagonists who valiantly test the potion, the world appears strangely slowed down, almost frozen in movement. The story got one of us (Schattschneider) thinking: If we could slow down time, could we see single photons fly through space? Could we observe relativistic phenomena? In particular, could we ever glimpse a strange prediction called the Terrell-Penrose effect?
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