Encyclopedia > Talk:Speed of light

  Article Content

Talk:Speed of light

The following needs to be reworked to make it fit in the context of an encyclopedia article. As it is it is a bit too chatty.

=== How Fast is the Speed of light ===

I like to use the vacation analogy to give people a feel for how fast the speed of light is. It goes like this. Let’s say I wanted to take a vacation on the moon. Fortunately there is a highway called Pretend that connects the earth to the moon. The speed limit on highway Pretend is 100 mph and I can only drive 10 hours a day. I had better pack a big trailer with plenty of food and pull it behind my SUV because under these conditions it is going to take me about 250 day to get from the earth to the moon. Light can travel the same distance in one and one forth seconds or about 5 beats of the drum at one-quarter time.


As a layman, I don't understand how it's possible for something to travel faster than c but not carry information faster than c. Could someone explain this? -- User:Evercat

A very rough explanation is that the "something' that travel faster than light doesn't carry energy. -- looxix 00:43 Apr 19, 2003 (UTC)
Also, it is only in a vacuum than nothing (no information) can travel faster than light; in a medium thing can travel faster than light (see Cherenkov effect) -- looxix 00:49 Apr 19, 2003 (UTC)



All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License

 
  Search Encyclopedia

Search over one million articles, find something about almost anything!
 
 
  
  Featured Article
KANU

... out of 122 seats. On December 29, 2002, the Kenyan electoral commission confirmed that the opposition National Rainbow Coalition (NARC) had won landslide victories over ...

 
 
 
This page was created in 38.7 ms