I just can't seem to put the speed of light in perspective with anything else. It just seems - well, instant! Can anyone put the speed of light in perspective for me?
The sun is about 93 Million miles away. If you were driving a car 93 miles an hour, it would take you 1 Million Hours to get from the sun to the earth.
Light does it in ~8 minutes.
hope that helps, -chris
Posts: 409 | Location: CT and TN USA | Registered: 06-03-02
Consider that Voyager, traveling into space at something around 20,000 miles per hour will take 73,000 years to reach the "nearest" star while light can make the trip in 4.22 years. Or that, if you were talking to a relative in California and another is in the room, standing about 20 feet away, the first relative will hear your voice first (though it may be a close call.) For all the perspectives we can create in our own lives, it is, for all intents, instantaneous.
The trip from your hometown of Austin to Dallas is just under 200 miles and will probably take over three hours to drive. Light can make the same trip 930 times in one second.
A quality stock car maintaining its top speed would take about a thousand hours to travel as far as light travels in one second.
Light can travel a distance equal to more than seven trips around the earth in one second.
Indeed, it does appear to be instantaneous. Unless, of course, you are speaking of intergalactic travel. The light you see from some stars took many years to reach the earth.
Posts: 7929 | Location: in the backwoods of North Carolina | Registered: 06-07-02
It would take a turtle the same amount of time to walk from Los Angeles to New York as it would take a beam of light to travel from our solar system to our nearest neighbor, Proxima Centauri.
Posts: 46 | Location: Santa Barbara, CA | Registered: 06-24-02