Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 85)

Trigger Happy
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of aim) at that high speed, he will have moved a
pathetic total of four inches sideways in the time it
takes your laser beam to travel from your guns to his
hull. So unless he is very small, he is still very blown
up. Eat dust, little green man.
But perhaps our alien has very, very quick
reactions. Maybe he can spot your lasers firing, and
immediately engage some sort of warp drive to get him
the hell out of there in time. No, again. Because he
cannot see your lasers coming until some light from
your firing guns has traveled to his eyes. Unfortunately,
your lasers arrive at precisely the same time. As soon as
he sees you fire, he’s dead.
14
And thanks to Einstein’s
theory of special relativity, one of whose principles is
that light appears to travel at a constant speed
regardless of the speed and direction of travel of any
observer, the alien is still fried the moment he sees you
fire even if he is running away in the opposite direction
as close to the speed of light as his little fusion engines
can manage.
That’s not all. Most of the time the lasers in this
epic space battle should be completely invisible. The
multi-hued rain of laser fire all around, a paradigm
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14 This example is modified from one given in Lawrence M. Krauss’s, The
Physics of Star Trek, p. 165.