Speed of light
Speed of light
The speed of light in vacuum, often called simply the speed of light and commonly denoted c, is a universal physical constant exactly equal to 299792458 m⋅s−1. It is exact because, by international agreement, a metre is defined as the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1⁄299792458 second. The value 299,792,458 metres per second is approximately 1 billion kilo
"Hubbles law predicts that galaxies beyond ...the Hubble distance, recede faster than the speed of light ...this distance is about 14 billion light years. ...galaxies with a redshift of about 1.5—...150 percent longer than the laboratory reference value—are receding at the speed of light. Equivalently, we are receding from those galaxies..."
"The radiation of the cosmic microwave background... has a red shift of about 1,000. ...the hot plasma of the early universe ...was receding from our location at about 50 times the speed of light."
"A light beam that is farther than the Hubble distance of 14 billion light-years ...cannot keep up with the stretching space."
"New Science must demolish the Constants, supposedly Absolute, ... for example: Speed of Light must be increased a Billionfold, in order to achieve Extraterrestrial Communication."
"It is hard to understand how this infinitely dense singularity can evaporate into nothing. For matter inside the black hole to leak out into the universe requires that it travel faster than the speed of light."
"In 5 billion years, the expansion of the universe will have progressed to the point where all other galaxies will have receded beyond detection. Indeed, they will be receding faster than the speed of light, so detection will be impossible. Future civilizations will discover science and all its laws, and never know about other galaxies or the cosmic background radiation. They will inevitably come to the wrong conclusion about the universe......We live in a special time, the only time, where we can observationally verify that we live in a special time."
"One of the funniest examples of these kinds of statistics comes from Evolution: Possible or Impossible by James F. Coppedge [who] cites an article by Ulric Jelinek … which claims that the odds are 1 in 10^243 against "two thousand atoms" (the size of one particular protein molecule) ending up in precisely that particular order "by accident." Where did Jelenik get that figure? From Pierre Lecompte du Nouy... who in turn got it from Charles-Eugene Guye, a physicist who died in 1942. Guye had merely calculated the odds of these atoms lining up by accident if "a volume" of atoms the size of the Earth were "shaken at the speed of light." In other words, ignoring all the laws of chemistry, which create preferences for the formation and behavior of molecules, and ignoring that there are millions if not billions of different possible proteins--and of course the result has no bearing on the origin of life, which may have begun from an even simpler protein. This calculation is thus useless for all these reasons, and is typical in that it comes to Coppedge third-hand (and thus to us fourth-hand), and is hugely outdated (it was calculated before 1942, even before the discovery of DNA), and thus fails to account for over half a century of scientific progress."
"But here is my mark, and there is where Im supposed to look, and believe me, the power and the pleasure and the emotion of this moment is as constant as the speed of light. It will never be diminished, nor will my appreciation."
"The strangest explanation was put forth by an Irish physicist, George Francis Fitzgerald. Perhaps, he said, the ether wind puts pressure on a moving object, causing it to shrink a bit in the direction of motion. To determine the length of a moving object, its length at rest must be multiplied by the following simple formula, in which \scriptstyle v^2 is the velocity of the object multiplied by itself, \scriptstyle c^2 is the velocity of light multiplied by itself: \scriptstyle \sqrt{1-\frac{v^2}{c^2}}. ...The speed of light in an unobtainable limit; when this is reached the formula becomes \scriptstyle \sqrt{1-\frac{c^2}{c^2}} which reduces to 0. ...In other words, if an object could obtain the speed of light, it would have no length at all in the direction of its motion!"
"[A]fter a close study of the experimental work of Michael Faraday,... James Clerk Maxwell succeeded in uniting electricity and magnetism in the framework of the . ...Beyond uniting... all... electric and magnetic phenomena in one mathematical framework, Maxwells theory showed—quite unexpectedly, that electromagnetic disturbances travel at a fixed and never-changing speed that turns out to equal that of light. From this, Maxwell realized that visible light itself is nothing but a particular kind of electromagnetic wave... Maxwells theory also showed that all electromagnetic waves—visible light among them—are the epitome of the peripatetic traveler. They never stop. They never slow down. Light always travels at light speed."
