#Speed of light vs speed of sound code

Air slightly slows down light, but only about 56 mi/s or 90 km/s. The reason it works is that light from lightning travels much faster through air than the sound of thunder. Every 5 seconds between the flash and the rumble equates to about a mile of distance between you and the lightning. This is the “flash-to-bang” method of calculating distance and it works. You may have heard that you can count the number of seconds between seeing lightning and hearing thunder to estimate the distance you are from the lightning strike. Each five seconds is about one mile of distance. Use the time between seeing lightning and hearing thunder to estimate the distance of the lightning strike. You can calculate that this tidal wave travels faster than light if driven by negative matter (an exotic form of matter which has never been seen.This entry was posted on Maby Anne Helmenstine (updated on May 10, 2021) You can do this either by:Ī) compressing the space in front of your and expanding the space behind you, so that you surf on a tidal wave of warped space. Negative matter. The most credible way of sending signals faster than light is via negative matter.

#Speed of light vs speed of sound code

You cannot send Morse code or usable information via red and green socks.)Ĥ. If you suddenly see that one foot has a red sock, then you know instantly, faster than the speed of light, that the other sock is green. You don’t know which leg wears which sock. (For example, let’s say a friend always wears one red sock and one green sock. This is because the information that breaks the light barrier is random, and hence useless. Information does go faster than light, but Einstein has the last laugh. Einstein thought that this therefore disproved the quantum theory, since nothing can go faster than light.īut actually this experiment (the EPR experiment) has been done many times, and each time Einstein was wrong. If I jiggle one electron, the other electron “senses” this vibration instantly, faster than the speed of light. If I then separate them, an invisible umbilical cord emerges which connects the two electrons, even though they may be separated by many light years. If I have two electrons close together, they can vibrate in unison, according to the quantum theory. Quantum entanglement moves faster than light. This image that hits the sphere then races across the entire sphere within a matter of seconds, although the sphere is one light year across.) Just the image of the beam as it races across the night sky is moving faster than light, but there is no message, no net information, no material object that actually moves along this image.ģ. The image from the light beam will eventually hit the sphere one year later. (Imagine that you are surrounded by a giant sphere one light year across. The problem here is that no material object is actually moving faster than light. If you wave a flashlight across the night sky, then, in principle, its image can travel faster than light speed (since the beam of light is going from one part of the Universe to another part on the opposite side, which is, in principle, many light years away). Therefore, empty space can certainly expand faster than light.Ģ.

But this only means that “nothing can go faster than light.” Since nothing is just empty space or vacuum, it can expand faster than light speed since no material object is breaking the light barrier. The Big Bang itself expanded much faster than the speed of light.