alt Hacker NewsWhenever I think about light speed being fast, I imagine myself standing at the edge of the solar system and watching a hypothetical photon travel from the Sun to the Earth and taking 8 minutes. Suddenly it doesn't feel like light is really all that fast except at human scales. 5 km/h would be fascinating though.
Replies
The speed of light is unbelievably slow, not even as a cosmic scale, but on earth.
We cannot play competitive multiplayer games globally, without 300ms ping. I dream of a world playing Black Ops 2 on a original PS3 in 2026 getting into a lobby because latency is low.
On the other hand think of the wavelength of light and how absurdly fast the oscillation frequency is to provide a wavelength of a few hundred nm at the speed of light. 8 minutes is a lot of cycles, and 150M km is a lot of wavelengths!
For the photon the time passed is 0 right?
But light is not really even light except at human inference level. Like yes if you were a god like being looking at this and understanding light in a proton level way, it wouldn't be very impressive but I would say that is not the right way to think about physcial phenomena. How can you even be sure time has any definite meaning outside human's concept of it? In that sense what do words faster or slower or minutes even mean
The globe here is, in my opinion, the best such visualization because I've personally travelled the distances depicted.
https://www.reddit.com/r/educationalgifs/comments/qq5cw7/coo...