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How far does light travel in 1 millisecond?

Light travels at a speed of 3.0 x 108 meters per second, or m/s. One light year represents the distance light travels in one year. We can use both of these facts to calculate how far light travels in ... read more

When you look up, how far back in time do you see?

While sound travels about a kilometre every three seconds, light travels 300,000 kilometres every second. When we see a flash of lighting three kilometres away, we are seeing something that happened a ... read more

How Far Does the Periodic Table Go?

Some of the newly synthesized elements seem to be more stable: one form of element 117 with 177 neutrons stuck around for 112 milliseconds. The next “magic number” for neutrons is predicted to be 184, ... read more

Ask Ethan: If Light Contracts And Expands With Space, How Do We Detect Gravitational Waves?

But how does that work? Amrish Pandya wants to know ... to the end of the interferometer arms and back. You agree to both travel at precisely 1 mile per hour. Just like LIGO’s laser light waves, you l... read more

The Science Behind Kinects or Kinect 1.0 versus 2.0

Figure 1 ... in travel distance since all sensors have some amount of thermal noise (i.e. free electrons floating through the semiconductor lattice) that look like light photons as well as having limi... read more

Video buffering or slow downloads? Blame the speed of light

While light travels slower in glass than it does in air, the result is a considerable improvement ... the round trip time between London and New York can be brought down below 100 milliseconds, reachi... read more

Your Questions About Gravitational Waves, Answered

The maximum amount of time for this trip is about 10 milliseconds ... wave? Does it have mass? If it doesn’t have mass, is it possible for it to move faster than the speed of light? Stuver: Gravitatio... read more

Nothing light about lightning

Satellites tell us that 1.2 billion lightning flashes occur in the atmosphere each year — although not all reach Earth. What is lightning? How does ... bolt: Light essentially reaches you instantly, b... read more

Dear Julius, this is what it really means to fire a gun in a war

So, when a rifle bullet is screaming towards you at anything between 750 metres per second and 1,000m/s (which ... you will see the flash of light a while before the bang arrives – all to do with dist... read more