Speed Light facts
While investigating facts about Speed Light Mph and Speed Lightning, I found out little known, but curios details like:
Gravity moves at the Speed of Light and is not Instantaneous. If the Sun were to disappear, we would continue our elliptical orbit for an additional 8 minutes and 20 seconds, the same time it would take us to stop seeing the light (according to General Relativity).
how speed light measured?
The scientific adviser to the 2014 film Interstellar spent two weeks talking Christopher Nolan out of having a character travelling faster than the speed of light, as it defies the laws of physics
What speed light squared?
In my opinion, it is useful to put together a list of the most interesting details from trusted sources that I've come across answering what speed light water. Here are 50 of the best facts about Speed Light Logistics and Lightspeed Internet I managed to collect.
what speed light travels?
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About the Oh-My-God Particle, a proton traveling at about 99.99999999999999999999951% the speed of light. It is the fastest moving object ever recorded and as it hit the atmosphere it carried the kinetic energy equivalent to a baseball traveling at 50MPH, all in one particle.
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Scientists detected an atomic nucleus traveling at 99.9999999999999% of the speed of light, with energy 20 quintillion times that of visible light. It was appropriately named the "Oh-My-God Particle."
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A billionaire is plotting to propel thousands of miniature satellites at 20% the speed of light by aiming minutes-long 100-gigawatt laser pulses at light sails as early as the 2040s, to arrive at Proxima B (the nearest Earthlike planet in the Goldilocks Zone of Alpha Centauri) by the 2060s
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After a Federal Reserve interest rate decision in 2013, trades were registered in the Chicago stock market within 2 milliseconds of the announcement. These trades were later found to be insider trading, as this information would take 7 milliseconds to reach Chicago at the speed of light.
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LA was the first major city to sync all it's traffic lights, doing so in 2015 after initially promising to do so in 1984. The completed synchronization supposedly increased travel speed by 16 percent and reduced travel times by 12 percent.
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Light in itself isn't special, it's just that according to Einstein, the fastest speed reachable in the universe is 300K m/s. It just happens that light is the only thing we detected that travels without limitations in vacuum, which is why we associate the speed limit of the universe with it.
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Gold is yellow, unlike its grey neighbors on the periodic table, due to Einstein's special relativity: the electrons are moving so fast, some over half the speed of light, that they have relativistic contraction, shifting the wavelength of light absorbed to blue and thus reflecting a golden glow
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With the cost of $367 Billion, a nuclear pulse powered interstellar spaceship can be built with 1968 technology to reach Alpha Centauri in 133 years; Achieving a top speed of 3.3% speed of light.
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President Ulysses S. Grant gave a homeless loiterer a free ride to the US Naval Academy. This man was Albert Michelson, who then went on to discover the speed of light and win a Nobel Peace Prize.
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The theory that in 'Superman' (1978), Superman doesn't actually turn back time by litterally reversing the earth's rotation. Instead, he himself travels to the past by flying faster than the speed of light, and the reversing earth is simply a visual metaphor for this.
Speed Light data charts
For your convenience take a look at Speed Light figures with stats and charts presented as graphic.
Why can't we travel at the speed of light?
You can easily fact check why is the speed of light what it is by examining the linked well-known sources.
A spaceship accelerating at 1g will reach close to the speed of light in about a year
Our galaxy plus a few more are trapped in this thing called the local group that only makes up 0.00000000001 percent of the observable universe and because of the nature of the expanding universe, we'll never be able to leave the local group. Even with light speed travel. - source
Until the 17th century most scientists believed that the speed of light was infinite. It was only in 1676 that Ole Rømer and Giovanni Cassini made the first measurement of the velocity of light (just 27% off the real value) by observing the orbits of the moons of Jupiter. - source
According to the Bohr model of the atom, elements with an atomic number higher than 137 can't exist as the first electron would travel faster than the speed of light
If you travel at 99% the speed of light away from the sun, the light from the sun would still pass by you at the speed of light relative to you. - source
What happens when we travel at the speed of light?
Gravity has speed, and the speed of gravity appears to be the same as the speed of light
How fast is the speed of light?
In 2013, trades were registered in Chicago within two milliseconds of a Federal Reserve announcement to raise interest rates. This was later proven to be insider trading, as that information would take three milliseconds to get to Chicago at the speed of light.
Not only would you need an infinite energy source to reach the speed of light, you would also need an infinite energy source to slow down from the speed of light once you were going that fast.
It would take over 5 and a half days travelling at the speed of light to reach the outer limits of our solar system.
The neutron star 'PSR J1748-2446ad' rotates on its axis 716 times per second, and is the fastest spinning known neutron star. At its equator, it spins at 24 percent of the speed of light.
In the 1990s, USAF Developed MARAUDER, a Plasma Toroid Rail Gun That Theoretically Could Fire Plasma Projectiles at 10,000 km/s, 3% the Speed of Light. In the Mid-1990s Results Were Classified Due its Success.
